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4- 







LIFE OF 
WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

VOLUME I 






WALTER Q. GRESHAM 

As A Law Student, Twenty Years of Age 



LIFE OF 

Walter Quintin Gresham 

1832-1895 



By 
MATILDA GRESHAM 



IN TWO VOLUMES 
WITH PORTRAITS 

VOLUME I 




CHICAGO 

RAND McNALLY & COMPANY 

1919 






Copyright, 1919, by, 
Otto Gresham ^ 



Press of Rand XYcNally & Company 

hhb <i7 rd20 ^ 






INTRODUCTORY 

LORD MACAULAY, in one of his essays, said that many 
of the English statesmen of his own and of earHer times 
were wanting in practical administrative ability by reason of^ 
their logistic powers, — their ability to refine and distinguish. 
Their very talents hampered them and their followers in reaching 
a conclusion, especially the right one, to which their less gifted 
and learned, but practical and clear headed, associates readily 
turned.- Of Macaulay's own treatment of Warren Hastings and 
Judge Impey, Judge Stephens said: "I think Macaulay made 
use of the ambiguous expressions because he was afraid of being 
definite for fear of being wrong." 

The career of Walter Quintin Gresham was before all else 
that of a lawyer and judge. Definiteness he insisted on — def- 
initeness of fact, of statement, of decision. That definiteness in 
affairs of State brought him criticism that he enjoyed — he was no 
diplomat. In this presentation of his life, therefore, the aim has 
been to be specific, and to make no statement which could n.ot 
be corroborated by the evidence. 

The niarshalling of the facts has been my part of the work. 
I have taken the evidence, have sifted it, and have presented it, 
just as I should prepare a brief for the court. But the facts 
themselves, and the deductions and conclusions, have come from 
the unclouded memory and clear mind of my mother, Matilda 
Gresham, the best informed witness obtainable and, I submit, 
competent. We have had to take into account the Editors and 
Censors, and we have bowed to their will and their judgment in 
some things where perhaps they were right and perhaps they 
were wrong. It has been hard to convince the Editors and the 
Censors that the woman was telling the story, and that her own 
life experiences and environments and "prejudices" fitted her 
for the task. 

That needle- work, all kinds of it — a recital of which the Cen- 
sor struck out of the text — that she was compelled to do as a part 
of her childhood education, and her practical knowledge of the 

1 See pages 632 and 641. 2 See page 800. 



vi INTRODUCTORY 

sewing-machine, qualified her to assist the judges with their 
models in deciding a question arising under the patent laws. 
Her experiences on the Mississippi River in 1863 and 1864, as a 
passenger on steamboats loaded with ammunition, gave her- a 
different view of the warning of the German Embassy of April 
22, igis, published in fifty American newspapers, than that of 
Lady Mackworth, the English Suffragist who sailed on and lost 
her life in the sinking of the ill-fated Lusitania. "Tommy-rot!" 
was her ladyship's comment. She didn't believe they could do 
it. Neither did the statesmen. 

By taking the lawyer's last fair chance the Lusitania could 
have been saved. As she approached the English Coast — whether 
or not under reduced speed, as it is said she crossed the Atlantic, she 
should have been convoyed. "That duty" to use a judicial phrase 
"was measured and dictated by the Exigencies," the possibilities of 
the occasion. And this, too, assuming we had no statute prohibiting 
the clearing of vessels, in time of war, carrying both passengers 
and ammunition — non-explosive ammunition if you please. 

Not in any sense by way of justification do we advert to this 
astounding act of cruelty, but to illustrate further the workings 
of the mechanical mind or the mechanical instinct, the highest 
form, perhaps, of intelligence, and the necessity for it in the 
practical administration of governmental affairs. Adopting one 
of Walter Q. Gresham's expressions, before the model is made 
there must be the conception, the vision. Quoting one of the 
most reverent and devout, revelations and not inventions have 
been some of the conceptions — beyond the imagination of man, 
of the immature, of the low born and of the ignorant — which 
have gone into machinery and made for the benefit of the race. 
George M. Pullman was not an educated man, but he saw at a 
glance what many a graduate of the best scientific schools of this 
country and Europe and those skilled in the management of rail- 
roads could not see, what the mechanic. Sessions, as set forth in 
Chapter XXXIII of this work, could do. That chapter and the 
preceding judicial chapters illustrate how Walter Q. Gresham 
helped as a judicial officer to enforce the provisions of the patent 
law which require that the credit of the invention shall go to the 
man or woman who conceives or imagines it, however much 
material advantage the law allows to accrue to the man who 



INTRODUCTORY Vll 

may aid in the practical adoption of the new idea, and the folly 
if not the danger of the material man attempting to assume the 
role of an inventor. It will also appear that the judicial mind was 
concerned, although adhering to the rule that if property rights 
were the basis of our civilization what would be the ultimate effect 
of the labor-saving machine in domestic and international affairs ? 

In view of the letters of Walter Q. Gresham, as set out in 
the Natchez chapters in this work, it will not do to say that 
passenger vessels without previous warnings were never fired on 
prior to 1915. But construing the statute as only prohibiting 
the carrying of passengers on vessels loaded with ammunition 
that might explode, and conceding that this construction, as it 
is claimed by universal acquiescence for a long period of years, was 
the correct construction of the statute, we want to submit with 
all due deference to all whom it may concern, that Walter Q. 
Gresham was enough of an executive, and had enough of a 
nose for news,i to have taken notice of a threat, even through a 
newspaper advertisement, to sink a passenger vessel because 
it was carrying ammunition. To be specific, Theodore Roose- 
velt said, after the sinking of the Lusitania, that had he 
been President he would have met the threat to sink with a 
declaration of war, but as a newspaper man he permitted the 
threat to pass unnoticed, and Colonel George Harvey was like- 
wise silent. As a matter of fact, there was no such universal 
acquiescence in the practical construction of the statute as to 
give it the same effect as if written so as to permit passengers 
and non-explosives on the same vessel, for William Jennings 
Bryan, as Secretary of State, opposed that construction. 

Walter Q. Gresham would obey the law in good faith, even 
though his conscience did not approve it, as is evidenced by his 
attitude toward the Fugitive Slave Provision of the National 
Constitution, and of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, to give it 
effect. With him, while the war legislated, but not exactly as 
he would have written it, he did not as a judge enter on con- 
structions that brought embarrassment to other judges, the 
judicial recall, for instance, and then the declaration that the war 
amendments were self executory. Written in blood, that was 
the only sane view for a court to take. Part of that legislation 

1 See page 641. 



viii INTRODUCTORY 

prohibited passengers on ships or boats carrying ammunition. 
The primary object was to remove the temptation that ammu- 
nition on those vessels gave to an enemy to destroy them. 

Opposed to the doctrine of Imperiahsm, the acquisition of 
possessions beyond the seas, not only as contrary to the principles 
and traditions of the Republic but because it involved large 
armaments, once entered on, Walter Q. Gresham said it could 
and should be maintained 

History shows that dispensing statutes and constitutions 
have been costly to rulers, statesmen and people. As a young 
lawyer, Walter Q. Gresham realized that the most potent argu- 
ment for secession was Wendell Phillips' statement: "vSeward will 
swear to support the constitution of the United States but will not 
keep his oath." In his mature years he concluded that the most 
potent argument for anarchy, what we now call Bolshevism, was 
the disposition of men in official position in this country, under 
the guise of construing constitutions, to avoid their constitutional 
obligations. Live up to the traditions and beliefs and compro- 
mises if you please, of the fathers or the Republic will go the route 
of the Roman Republic. He believed that "that instinct of reason 
that was common to the masses" no statesman or ]jolitician could 
long impose on. Not by way of criticism of the present leader 
of Democracy, was any of the text "of these two volumes written. 
All of it was prepared even before Mr. Wilson became President. 
I voted for him in 19 1 6. It has taken a long time to get by the critics 
and the censors. "The Case System," one of the best methods 
for teaching the novice in the law, has been in a measure resorted 
to, to illustrate the power and functions of the Government of 
the United States and its preservation, with all of its imperfec- 
tions — to be cured by amendment, — which Walter Q. Gresham 
believed should be preserved for the benefit of the race. 

And the war just closing was finally prosecuted by Great 
Britain and the United States on the lines Walter Q. Gresham 
said he would make war. His views (as to how to make modern 
war) as set forth in our last chapter (pages 799 to 802) were 
written and criticized long before August, 19 14. That criticism 
suggests the thought that, although a pacifist, but not a non- 
resistant, indeed, an adept in the art of defending by attacking, 
he would not have waited until the regular organizations in the 



INTRODUCTORY IX 

War Department fell down before utilizing the mechanic, the 
business organization, the business method, the business man, 
and if you j^lease, the malefactor of wealth. At the minimum 
his system would have put, as one of his surviving comrades 
'in the Anny of the Tennessee said the night following the 
declaration of war on Germany, 3,000,000 men in France by 
March i, 1918. 

James E. Stewart, who avowed his indebtedness to Walter 
Q. Gresham for counsel and advice, and whose ability in civil 
affairs is set forth in Chapter XL (beginning at page 641), and 
something of a soldier, organized in ten days in July, 1918, the 
nth Illinois, and as he marched it through the city of Chicago 
a few days later said it was as good as any that had gone to 
France. This actual demonstration of Governor Lowden's 
executive capacity — and he had some tutelage under George 
M. Pullman — is conclusive, we submit, that Walter Q. Gresham 
was conservative in his statement as to what might have been 
done in Illinois in raising volunteers. Operating on business and 
mechanical lines. Governor Lowden and his organization could in 
three months following the declaration of war against Germany 
have delivered to the National Government 500,000 men ready 
equipped for shipment to Gemiany. 

Conceding but not admitting the fact that the draft, the 
selective service, will produce more men than the volunteer system, 
it failed to produce the machinery, the guns, ammunition, and 
aeroplanes, to equip the drafted army. James P. Goodrich was 
one of the young fellows who undertook to make Walter Q. 
Gresham President in 1S8S. Experienced in mechanical and 
business affairs, as well as politics. Governor Goodrich's Indiana 
State Council of Defense, headed by Wih H. Hays, served as 
a model for State and Nation. "A hundred billion of dollars 
and 5,000,000 of men if necessary, and not a boycott, " is the way 
the Chairman of the Indiana Council of Defense said he would 
win the war, and demonstrated his executive capacity. That 
maxim that Hays learned as a country lawyer that one of the 
best ways to defend was to attack, was passed on to the man in 
Washington. 

General Omar Bundy, the son of Judge M. L. Bundy,' of 

1 See page 758. 



X INTRODUCTORY 

our Hawaiian chapter, opened the jack-pot at Chateau Thierry. 
The sire many times when on the defense in a lawsuit converted 
a riot into a victory by digging into the plaintiff. ^ The son 
stopped the Germans, and got sent home, but made Foch come 
in, and it is said it took much arguing on General Pershing's 
part to make the aged Frenchman "front face to the rear."^ 
The parallel in part is in General Grant's case as we detail it in 
the Shiloh chapter.'^ Grant disobeyed orders and was relieved, 
although he "whipped them," and destroyed, according to many 
of the Southern historians, the best single asset the Confederacy 
had, General Albert Sidney Johnson, who was killed on the after- 
noon of the first day. When Mr. Lincoln got all the facts, General 
Grant was restored to his command. It was Colonel T. Lyle 
Dickey, the bearer of a message from General Grant, the Com- 
mander of the Army of the Tennessee, to the President of the 
United States, who silenced the criticism of General Grant's 
drinking "by the Generals and the Colonels who were thicker 
in Willard's Hotel in Washington than they were in the Army 
of the Tennessee," by declaring with much emphasis and some 
profanity that if the President of the United States would look 
up "the brand of whisky General Grant drank and order a train- 
load down here for the Anny of the Potomac, enough for the 
Commander-in-Chief and down to the last private, the govern- 
ment might make some headway with the war in Virginia." When 
Mr. Lincoln heard of the incident a few hours later he was delighted 
and said, "Dickey, I am going to steal this idea from you. You 
must never use it again, and I will give it to the next delegation 
of preachers who come up here protesting against General Grant's 
drinking." At that time Dickey was on Grant's staff. In civil 
life he was a lawyer and a good one and he died a member of the 
Supreme Court of Illinois. 

We by no means deprecate preparation in a lawsuit nor 
training for military men. Adverting to the simile that Thomas 
F. Bayard, Ambassador to the Court of St. James in 1S95, used 
in advising Walter Q. Gresham that the war was coming, "These 
European nations are watching each other like pugilists in a 
ring,""* we suggest that it was learned by that time that pugilists 
could be trained too line. In Grant's days they fought with 

1 See page 185. 2 See page 240. 3 See page 175. 4 See page 794- 



INTRODUCTORY xi 

bare knuckles and for blood. To be specific — before Foch came 
in, but after Bundy landed his "jolt" — as I have heard the 
spectators and seconds at the ringside urge the strong, husky 
young fighter, "Rush him now!" — the cry went up, "We can 
win!" The lines we quote from Grant's Memoirs in the Shiloh 
chapter, about General Grant being able to go farther with 
volunteers than Buel with professional soldiers, were sent to the 
President of the United States with the statement that General 
John A. Rawlins, General Grant's Chief of Staff, was a volunteer 
who died the most influential man in the Republic, and that the 
Army of the Tennessee, which Grant and Rawlins organized out 
of volunteers, never was ''whipped.''' It is said that General 
Bundy is not entitled to the credit of ordering the advance 
at Chateau Thierry. So be it. Then let credit be given to the 
man who gave that order. The best that Foch did was to 
get a "draw." They could have had that at any time after 
it was demonstrated that we had the " punch, "^ and thus saved 
thousands of lives. 

Senator Lodge helped edit "The Education of Henry Adams." 
That element of force, the Russian Fleet- for instance, that was 
back of all the diplomacy so graphically set forth, seems to have 
escaped them. I was at the courtroom meeting described in the 
'77 Strike chapter.^ I went into General Chapman's company. 
Aften\'ards I went with General Spooner, the United States 
Marshall, to the Arsenal, after the Federal troops came. I heard 
the conference between General Spooner, General Morrow and 
General Harrison, for as I dropped out at the office door General 
Harrison said, "Spooner, bring the boy in." General Harrison 
called General Spooner, "Spooner," while General Spooner 
addressed General Harrison as "Ben." With General Morrow 
they were very formal. There was much discussion as to how 
many men General Spooner would take with him. Finally he 
ended the conference by saying, "Two lieutenants and fifty men, 
if they are good ones, are all I want." 

When we returned to the Federal Building my father said, 
"You cannot go to Terre Haute with General Spooner. There 
may be some trouble at our home; go and stay there until this 

1 British General Maurice's term. 2 See page 266. 3 See page 387 et seq. 



xii INTRODUCTORY 

squall is over." Our residence was then on the outskirts of 
Indianapolis, on the corner of what is now i8th and Capitol 
Avenue, a block from any other house. I owned a good breach- 
loading, double-barrel shotgun and a rifle, and there were two 
army revolvers in the house. That evening, a beautiful moon- 
light night, while my mother. Senator McDonald and General 
Harrison sat imder the trees, General Harrison assured vSenator 
McDonald "that the boys will make no move this bright, moon- 
light night, and to-morrow morning that express car of ammu- 
nition will be here from Chicago." The men on the Indianapolis, 
Peru & Chicago Railroad did not strike, but they did not know 
they were rushing ammunition to Indianapolis. As soon as the 
ammunition reached Indianapolis, wide publicity was given to 
its arrival. There was little ammunition although plenty of 
arms and artillery at the arsenal when the trouble began, but there 
was an ample supply of cartridges for General Harrison's and 
Chapman's companies. General Harrison had come with General 
Morrow and Captain Isaac C. Arnold, the Commandant of the 
Arsenal, to meet Senator McDonald and others of the Committee 
of Public Safety for a conference at our house. Leaving the con- 
ference in the library, General Harrison and Senator McDonald 
came out to visit with my mother and Mrs. Smith, the widow of 
General Giles A. Smith.' And my education has not been entirely 
under the tutelage of warriors, statesmen, lawyers, and school 
teachers. 

It was disobedience to orders that brought Colonel Benjamin 
Harrison his promotion, his most devoted followers always claimed. 
The 70th Indiana was being cut to pieces in a ravine at Resaca. 
When Colonel Harrison applied to the Division Commander for 
permission to charge in order to save the regiment from anni- 
hilation, with a reprimand he was sent back to hold the line. 
He charged, nevertheless, carried the position in front of him, 
and the line was advanced and "Joe" Hooker commended the 
Colonel of the 70th in general orders. 

As a trial lawyer General Harrison knew how to defend by 
attacking, as appears in the account of the Brownlee case,^ and 
he suffered more mental anguish than he did at Resaca when, in 
appearing for the Government of the United States in the Jennings 

1 See page 307. ^ See page 447. 



INTRODUCTORY XlU 

County Election Cases, ^ Colonel A. W. Hendricks put him on 
the defense and almost out before he was fairly started on the 
Government case. 

Not one jot or tittle from Benjamin Harrison's fame, if 
any, wotild we detract. Our friends as well as our critics wil^ 
have to concede that we have had some knowledge of his limita- 
tions and that I, as a lawyer of more than fifteen years' experience 
with all sorts of courts and juries, knew the sire had enough force 
of character and popularity with the common ordinary man in 
1892 to do what he said he was going to do, split with President 
Harrison and the RepubHcan party. Moreover, it can perhaps 
]3e understood that we could tell the newspaper men by counties 
and townships at least in Indiana where the votes were that 
would go with him.- George Ade was the only newspaper man 
who would publish our figures. All the rest were afraid, as Judge 
Stephens would say, of being wrong. Not all the "practice and 
procedure" are in the books, as many trial lawyers will testify. 
At sixteen years of age I learned the law of conspiracy in the 
courtroom from Benjamin Harrison's lips. As the years rolled on 
I learned that he was committed to certain principles of govern- 
ment — and some of the succeeding pages show that he realized 
the effect and protested against certain measures of his party. ^ 
It was difficult to get newspaper men to quote views privately 
expressed, that he was against the Imperialism which William 
McKinley and William Jennings Bryan in a measure committed 
us to in the Philippines. The editors were afraid General Harri- 
son would disavow; on the contrary, he was glad to stand up and 
be counted; and yet the Editors said I could not have learned 
at the fireside how "Old Uncle Dennis" made William Henry 
Harrison and Governor Posey in territorial days come along on 
the slavery question. 

Theorists and statesmen may legislate, l^ut after all it was 
Walter Q. Gresham's conception that government and civilization 
depend on force — on men like Grant, Fitzsimmons," and Bund}^ 
the man who can go up in the plane, down in the submarine, or 
lead the suicide club with the infantryman at his heels — or the 
man with moral courage or force enough to break with his party, ^^ 
or to stand up against a Grant — as well as the consent of the 

1 See page 472. 2 See page 675- 3 See page 656. 4 See page 800. 5 See page 670. 



XIV INTRODUCTORY 

governed. Again, with all due deference to the devout and the 
materialist, "the favored of Him who rules on high " is not always 
considerate of functionaries and forms. Often he alone is con- 
scious of his gifts until there is an actual demonstration. Accord- 
ing to Milton, although recognizing "the Potenc};^ of Him above," 
the devil's conception was that the human race is his "inferior 
in power and excellence." 

The women of Walter Q. Gresham's family were not denied 
the privilege of thinking out loud, even if they were at times a 
little illogical in reaching their conclusions. And he was not 
adverse to accepting Matilda Gresham's conclusions, even though 
based on illogical processes, in aid of his own judicial conscience. 
To get the human point of view, he often invoked the judgment 
of well-informed women outside his own family. 

The rule of law that prevents husband and wife from testify- 
ing for or against each other is not founded on the rule that the 
best informed shall best enlighten the court. Time was, within 
the memory of men now living, when the parties who of necessity 
knew more about the facts in a litigation, if plaintiff or defendant 
on the civil side or defendant in the King's Court or the courts of 
the States of this Union, could not testify, even though his or her 
property or his or her life were involved. 

The facts presented in this work comprise the testimony of 
Matilda Gresham, presented to the court of the public as a com- 
petent witness. Southern by birth and inheritance, she had 
heard slavery discussed from girlhood, and was familiar with its 
moral and social aspects, its historical and legal bearings, as 
fully almost as her husband. She is therefore a competent wit- 
ness on this subject, and as it forms a very considerable part of 
this work the reader should bear her competency in mind in case 
the facts and conclusions given do not always agree with his own 
understandings and conceptions. The attitude of Union officers, 
at the front, as to the lines on which reconstruction should be 
undertaken, Matilda Gresham states just as she heard the subject 
discussed in camp and army headquarters. The history of the 
important legal cases Walter Q. Gresham handled as a Federal 
Judge, the history of his acts as a member of the cabinet of two 
administrations, his breaking away from his party in 1892, 
Matilda Gresham gives from the standpoint of the one person 



INTRODUCTORY XV 

in the world most competent to understand the motives that 
actuated her husband. She took part in daily councils whenever 
any momentous matter was at issue, and her judgment and opinion 
were asked and often counted in the final act. She is therefore a 
competent witness before the court, and it is hoped that her narra- 
tive, as presented in these volumes, will be accepted as a sincere 
attempt to make clear the events of those years when the destinies 
of our great country were in the crucible, and of the part that 
Walter Q. Gresham had in them. 

Her deductions are her own, and while the Editor and the 
Censor may say they are often only the prejudice of the woman 
and of the "Lost Cause," it can be affirmed that even prejudices 
are realities. The consideration for the Southern brother that 
Walter Q. Gresham manifested as a schoolboy was not lessened 
by his association with the woman of prejudices. The means or 
arguments that he brought to bear on those prejudices, that 
assuaged the prejudices of the Union soldiers, are a part of the 
unwritten history of the times. Horace Bell was afraid of no 
man, but he quailed before the prejudices of a woman — it took 
a woman, his second wife, to induce him to let the true story of 
the "Brandenburg Affair"^ be written. 

Questions, too, that Walter Q. Gresham said the fathers 
thought would be settled without the wager of battle,- the Editors 
and Censors say the woman should not be permitted to assert 
could and should have been settled as reasonable men settle 
differences. "Absolutely contrary to all history," said the 
Editors, when the woman asserted what she knew as a child, 
what she learned before, during, and after the Rebellion, that 
the large slaveholder was not a Secessionist, that it was the 
Abolitionist and the "Hill Billies" who precipitated the war. 
Our text shows that on the final call it was Wendell Phillips, the 
Abolitionist lawyer, who insisted on the wager of battle. One 
of our Abolitionist Editors changed our text to read, "The Fugi- 
tive Slave Law of 1850 was probably constitutional." We adhere 
to our original statement that it was constitutional and we are 
borne out by the opinions of Clay and Webster, by opinions of 
every Federal judge on the Circuits in the North, foremost among 
whom was Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Benjamin R. 

1 Chapter V, page 78. 2 Chapter XXIX, page 470. 



xvi INTRODUCTORY 

Curtis, whose appointment Mr. Webster had secured from Presi- 
dent Fillmore because as a lawyer Curtis had promptly declared 
the law constitutional, and finally, by the Supreme Court of the 
United States, in Ableman vs. Booth, 21 Howard 506. The 
Editor wanted to excuse his ancestor for disobeying the law. 
"An unconstitutional law is void, and is as no law."^ Wendell 
Phillips never denied it was constitutional. It helped prove his 
second premise that the constitution of the United States was a 
pro-slavery instrument. He continued to maintain what Justice 
Curtis conceded to be his right to revolt and figured there would 
be no place for Curtis to stop in the Dred Scott case. And so it 
is that we say in Chapter VI, the Dred Scott case was one made 
up by the Abolitionists.^ 

The lawyer often goes "far afield" but always with the hole in 
mind out of which he will come — often to the amazement and 
chagrin of the statesmen and the judges to say nothing of the less 
informed. Wendell Phillips, an adept in the practice of his pro- 
fession, was not the first on this line. James Otis preceded him, 
and, as we show, conceived the American Nation.* Hargrave, 
the English lawyer, in the "Negro Case" copied Otis and played 
on Mansfield's prejudice against Massachusetts.'' Walter Q. 
Gresham as a lawyer could see a hole through a millstone as soon 
as most of his associates and not much was ever "put over" on 
him as a judge. 

Thomas Dnmimond, the czar of the Seventh Circuit, as one 
aggrieved lawyer denounced him, prominent in the judicial chap- 
ters, '" who never sidestepped a patent case, was appointed United 
States District Judge for the District of Illinois by President Tay- 
lor a short time before the appointment of Benjamin R. Curtis 
to the Supreme Court. To my own knowledge, night after night 
Matilda Gresham heard Thomas Drummond and Walter Q. 
Gresham discuss not only Otis, Mansfield, the English judge, 
and Hargrave, the English lawyer, the English judges and lawyers 
of that time as well as many of the English judges and lawyers 
who welcomed Thomas Drummond as a man who made prece- 
dent, but also the avowed incapacity of Justice Harlan in patent 
litigation, the shortcomings of the Supreme Court on that branch 

lln re Siebold, loo U S^ 376. 2 See page 106. 3 See page 38. 

4 See page 36. 5 Chapters XXI, XXII, XXIII, and XXXII. 



INTRODUCTORY xvii 

of the law as set forth in the judicial chapters, Wendell Phillips, 
Benjamin R. Curtis, the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 — the consti- 
tutionality of which District Judge Drummond sustained before 
Mr. Curtis went on the bench — Abraham Lincoln, Stephen A. 
Douglas, and the Lincoln-Douglas debates. After serving in the 
legislature, with Lincoln and Douglas both as lawyers appeared 
in Judge Drummond's court. Often the women broke into the 
discussion. To use one of Judge Drummond's own expressions, 
"I first settled at Galena and became one of the 'Galena Gang,' " 
among whom was Ulysses S. Grant, and last but not least in im- 
portance on the practical side, J. Russell Jones.' 

After Benjamin R. Curtis 's dissent and resignation in the 
Dred Scott case only to meet Phillips' scorn, for the judgment 
of the court proved finally Phillips' second premise, that the 
constitution of the United States was a pro-slavery instrument, 
Curtis went back to the bar and became the counsel and adviser 
of the commercial interests of New England whose lines were 
every day becoming more potential in the Northwest. Before 
going on the bench he had been denounced by Phillips as "the 
Boston representative of the New Orleans Cotton Exchange" 
and then as "the Fugitive Slave Bill Judge." Mr. Curtis often 
appeared in Judge Drummond's court. And as we further 
heard at the fireside, on the advice of Judge Drummond, J. 
Russell Jones employed Benjamin R. Curtis to aid Corydon 
Beckwith, the regular counsel for Mr. Jones' corporations, in 
their contest with the corporations steered by Melville W. Fuller. 
"And the way we cleaned up the future Chief Justice of the 
United States and his clients," said Mr. Jones, "gave me all the 
credit I needed with the financial interests." Written opinions 
of Mr. Curtis up to a few years ago were among the archives of 
the North Chicago Street Railway Company. "Law suits were 
brought in remote districts," said Mr. Jones, "and prosecuted 
through the Supreme Court without the Supreme Court or ' Mel ' 
Fuller suspecting the use that would be and finally was made 
of the decisions thus obtained." 

"Something of a speculator on the safe side," as Matilda 
Gresham says,^ when she came home and told her father, who 
was a secessionist, that she proposed to "bet on the Union" — • 

1 See pages 139 and 140; also pages 335 and 336. 2 See page 196. 

B 



XVlll INTRODUCTORY 

that is, buy government bonds, — the reader will probably 
conclude that she could appreciate and intelligently set forth her 
husband's financial position, and later on did not want any of 
J. Russell Jones's street railway securities. 

Availing ourselves of the rule of pleading that admits of an- 
ticipating and countering possible objections, we advert to the 
statement of James G. Blaine, in his " Twenty Years of Congress," 
that the large slaveholder and man of property in the South was 
against secession, and that her own moral instincts as a child 
were reflected, as Walter Q. Gresham said, in the utterances of 
all the Southern jurists and the best of the Southern men. On 
December 27, 1856, Colonel Robert E. Lee wrote to his wife: 
"There are few, I believe, in this enlightened age who will not 
acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral and political 
evil in any countr>^ . . I think it is a greater evil to the white 
than to the black race." Concrete proof of the evil to the white 
race could be furnished by Matilda Gresham, and a great many 
people of the South will admit it to-day. But at that it must 
be granted that the contact with such men and women as Robert 
E. Lee and his wife, and there were many such in the South, 
fostered the claim that the institution was humanizing and 
Christianizing to the savage. 

Before " Pat " Clebtu-n put it up in writing to the President of 
the Confederacy, Colonel Edmund Barkley of the 8th Virginia 
Regiment, Pickett's Division, is our authority for the statement 
that General Lee orally advised Mr. Davis to free and conscript 
the negro. So there may be something in the claims of Jefferson 
Davis and Robert E. Lee that it was a theory of government 
and not a principle of morals for which they "went out." 

Before the resolutions of '98 the nth Amendment to the Con- 
stitution of the United States, which prohibits a State of the 
Union from being sued by a citizen of the United States in the 
Supreme Court of the United States, was put on its way to rati- 
fication. In Chisholm vs. Georgia, the first milestone of the 
constitution, decided by the Supreme Court of the United States 
in 1793, Chisholm was given a judgment for money which the 
State of Georgia owed him. Pending the adoption of the Con- 
stitution of the United States, there were many claims of indi- 
viduals against the States which went into suit as soon as the 



INTRODUCTORY XIX 

Supreme Court of the United States was organized. When the 
State of Georgia said the attempted enforcement of the Chisholm 
judgment would be resisted with force, John Marshall, afterwards 
rated our greatest Chief Justice, along with John Hancock, then 
the Governor of Massachusetts, and John Sedgwick, then a mem- 
ber of Congress and the Federalist speaker of the House, became 
the leaders in pressing for the nth Amendment to do as it did, 
prohibit a citizen suing a State in the courts of the United States. 
Immunity of the State from suit in the face of threats of forcible 
resistance was the very essence if not the virile seed of secession. 
Chief Justice Marshall's fame as a jurist rests largely on those 
subsequent milestones of the constitution which he wrote in around 
that nth Amendment, but that his fine judicial judgments did 
not disturb the belief of the advocates of the supremacy of the 
State may possibly be understood by the reader of our chapter ^ 
in which it is set forth that Walter Q. Gresham, as the orator of 
the Army of the Tennessee, in welcoming "the old commander" 
home from his trip around the world in 1879, said, "the supremacy 
of the States which the South asserted and we denied was sur- 
rendered at Appomattox." And then he added what the Editors 
would not allow in our text — a wide publicity of which might 
in these later days have saved some men from prison stripes,- — 
"that the soldiers wrote that the National Government can use jorce 
not only at home but also abroad." 

And reared as I was, it can perhaps be comprehended that 
as a lawyer my task was easy, — for I could see the conviction 
produced, — in advising men, both white and black, who, it was 
said, had been influenced by the pacifists and Pro-Germans. I 
had them enlisting before the draft came. The white men were 
concerned about an early decision of the Supreme Court of the 
United States, that men could not be drafted for service abroad, 
while the negroes said, "We owe no duty to that old Confeder- 
ate Government. They never did want us free, nohow." In 
arguing a proposition, a lawyer is seldom ever embarrassed by 
sensibilities and what the critics and literary men call good taste, 
especially if the mind to be reached is not concerned by such 
considerations. It was not so much a case of "German Propa- 

1 See Chapter XXIX. 

2U. S. vs. Krafft 249 Fed. Rep. 919. Selective Draft Law Cases, 24s U. S. 367. Chief 
Justice White, an ex-Confederate, writing the opinion. 



XX INTRODUCTORY 

ganda" as of hysteria on the part of many of our good men and 
women, when they criticized those who did not agree with every 
visionary, impracticable, and unconstitutional measure as soon 
as proposed. 

Never did Walter Q. Gresham say or do an unwise thing as to 
the slavery question. He understood its history better than most 
men, and he was able to reconcile the point of view of the South 
with that of the North, but when it came to the jeopardy of the 
Union he did not hesitate as to the side with which his destiny 
was linked. 

Our Southern women at least will appreciate Walter Q. Gres- 
ham's insistence that at the start it must not be a John Brown 
servile insurrection. Back of the scenes a single man in a well- 
oiled complicated piece of political machinery may be most 
potential. The young men who would have to do the fighting 
told the statesmen where to head in. That the contest was 
fierce is shown by the fact that Walter Q. Gresham incurred the 
charge of being disloyal from no less a man than Oliver P. Morton, 
the evidence of which the woman preserved and has set forth in 
this book.^ 

Suggesting to General Crocker in March, 1864, that his negress 
cook at the Hebron Mansion was a Confederate spy. Confederate 
officers since the war have said attests the accuracy of the woman 
instincts and illustrates conditions that the Yankees seldom if 
ever realized. The devotion of the negro "to his beloved South," 
as "Pat" Cleburn put it, is conclusively established by the fact 
that negroes are to-day on the pension rolls of most if not all 
of the Cotton States. 

That there were as good Union men south of Mason and 
Dixon's line as there were north of it, and slaveholders at that, — 
Kentucky was full of them, — -was clearly known to Matilda 
Gresham and to Walter Q. Gresham. Senator Zebulon Vance and 
Mrs. Vance were among their intimates in Washington. In the 
early days of 1861 all over North Carolina "Zeb" Vance made 
Union speeches. "If North Carolina goes out of the Union she 
will go to hell," wound up many a speech that produced convic- 
tion. In response to those speeches North Carolina elected 
delegates pledged to the Union, and in convention assembled those 

1 See pages 136 and 212. 



INTRODUCTORY XXI 

delegates so voted. But when these same delegates, carried away 
by the hysteria in South Carolina, forgot their instruction and 
voted North Carolina out of the Union, Vance was one of the first 
to enlist in the Confederate army, and in 1862, when a colonel, he 
was elected war governor of the State. And the way he impressed 
slackers and antebellum fire-eaters into the anny accounts for 
the fact that North Carolina had more men in line at the surrender 
than almost the whole balance of the South combined. 

General Sherman wanted to continue "Zeb" Vance and 
similar men in office after the surrender.^ But of this there is no 
mention in the Southern histories. 

As governor of North Carolina "Zeb" Vance encountered 
the opposition of North Carohna judges, who criticized in habeas 
corpus proceedings the judgment of Chief Justice Taney in Able- 
man vs. Booth. Other judges upheld that decision and pointed 
out that the Wisconsin decision, which the Ableman case reversed, 
if upheld in the Confederacy would do for it what the Wisconsin 
decision had done for the Union, help split it.- To the absence 
of a Federal judiciary and decisions such as the War Governor 
of North Carolina encountered Walter Q. Gresham pointed as 
indisputable proof that "the Confederacy" would ultimately go 
to pieces. Sitting in for months at the mess table with soldiers, 
at the dinner table with the planter and the man and woman 
from the North whose property interests took them South right 
in the midst of the war, the reader of the Natchez chapters 
will perhaps be able to agree with Matilda Gresham, that her 
husband was always considerate of the welfare of the individual 
man and woman, that is, he always looked on the practical 
side and saw many things — decisions of the Southern or Con- 
federate Courts — that concerned the men and women of those 
days that have not been much commented on even in the South. 

There is complete corroboration in the recital of facts as set 
forth in the opinion of the Supreme Court of the United States 
in Neal Dow vs. Johnson, 100 U. S. 158, of what the woman says 
about conditions in Natchez in 1863 and 1864. 

Opposing Walter Q. Gresham's entering Cleveland's cabinet 
as vehemently as she opposed his entering the "Yankee" army, 

1 Chapter XVII, page 281; Chapter XIX, pages 322 and 324; Sherman's Letters, 
pages 243 and 245. 

2 In the matter of Bryan's Petition, 60 N. C. i. 



XXll INTRODUCTORY 

Matilda Gresham, like "Zeb" Vance, yielded to circumstances, 
and like a good soldier became an efficient supporter of the second 
Cleveland administration, just as she had supported her husband 
as a Yankee soldier. 

The preparation of this work has been a matter of years. For 
aid rendered us we are indebted first to S. W. Burnham, the noted 
astronomer who was Clerk of the United States Circuit Court for 
the Northern District of Illinois, John H. R. Jamar, Deputy Clerk 
in that office, Noble C. Butler, Clerk, and W. C. Nicholas and 
Edward McDevitt, Deputy Clerks, of the United States Court at 
Indianapolis, Henry Watterson, Samuel B. Kerr. James Surget, 
Captain Allen G. Bowie, George W. Lindsay, John F. Jenkins, 
Mrs. S. B. Rumble, Miss Annie L. Rumble, Miss Julia Nutt, Mrs. 
Rhodes, Mrs. W. P. Gallon, Lieut. Aaron R. ("Tip") Stanton of 
Natchez, Miss., Mrs. Ora Thompson Ross, Mrs. Morris Ross, 
Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, Congressman J. Hampton 
Moore, Congressman Wm. E. Cox, Henry Vincent, Louis How- 
land, Hewitt Hanson Howland, William H. Blodgett, Charles 
W. Smith, Captain Eli F. Ritter, John W. Munday, Robert H. 
Parkinson, General James E. Stewart, and the banker, Edmund 
D. Hulbert. 

The manuscript has been re-written many times. Even in 
the proof, many changes have been made, the latter chiefly at the 
suggestion of Mr. F. G. Browne, who has supervised the making 
of the volumes and has prepared the elaborate analytical Index. 

Chicago, Otto Gresham. 

September i, iqiq. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER I — BIRTH, ANCESTRY, AND EARLY YEARS i 

MRS. GRESHAM'S birth AND ANCESTRY— CONDITIONS IN KEN- 
TUCKY IN THE '40'S AND So'S — HER FATHER'S RELIGION AND 
POLITICS ^ MEETS WALTER Q. GRESHAM, A LAW STUDENT AT 
CORYDON — HIS BIRTH AND ANCESTRY — ACCOUNT OF " OLD 
UNCLE DENNIS" PENNINGTON, ONE OF INDIANA'S FIRST SET- 
TLERS AND FOREMOST ANTI-SLAVERY MEN — PENNINGTON's 
LONG LEGISLATIVE CAREER -^ CHANGE OF INDIANA'S CAPITAL 
FROM VINCENNES TO CORYDON — HARRISON COUNTY'S FIRST 
SETTLER, MAJOR JOHN HARBISON — RESCUE OF HARBISON's 
STEPCHILDREN FROM THE INDIANS — GRESHAm's SCHOOL DAYS, 
STUDY OF LAW AND ADMISSION TO THE BAR — HIS PARTNER- 
SHIP WITH T. C. SLAUGHTER — EARLY PRACTICE. 

CHAPTER II— THE "UNDERGROUND .RAILROAD" . .32 

PERSONAL LIBERTY LAWS — THE SOMMERSET OR " NEGRO 
case" — MAN STEALING ACT AND JOINT RESOLUTION — FUGITIVE 
SLAVE LAWS — PRIGG CASE — CALIFORNIA GOLD RUSH — WENDELL 
PHILLIPS HOLDS MASSACHUSETTS OUT OF THE UNION BUT 
WEBSTER ENFORCES THE NATIONAL LAW — WALTER Q. GRESHAM 
NO ABOLITIONIST. 

CHAPTER III— THE KANSAS -NEBRASKA BILL ... 56 

"squatter sovereignty" — CORRESPONDENCE WITH SALMON 
P. CHASE — THE ELECTION OF 1854 — ATTEMPT TO DEFEAT 
WILLIAM H. ENGLISH, DEMOCRATIC MEMBER OF CONGRESS — 
WALTER Q. GRESHAM ANTI-NEBRASKA CANDIDATE FOR PROSE- 
CUTING ATTORNEY ^ASIATIC CHOLERA — " KNOW-NOTHING " 
RIOTS IN LOUISVILLE — BLOODY MONDAY — GRESHAM ON THE 
STUMP — ^ HELPS ORGANIZE THE REPUBLICAN PARTY. 

CHAPTER IV — MARRIAGE— CAMPAIGN OF 1858 ... 72 

MARRIAGE AND WEDDING TRIP — NEWSPAPERS — BUCHANAN 
REPUDIATES KANSAS-NEBRASKA BILL — ATTEMPTS TO ADMIT 
KANSAS AS A SLAVE STATE — ^DOUGLAS DENOUNCES AND DEFEATS 
BUCHANAN — KANSAS REJECTS ENGLISH BILL. 

CHAPTER V— THE BRANDENBURG AFFAIR .... 78 

WALTER Q. GRESHAm's LAW BUSINESS — THE BRANDENBURG 
AFFAIR — HEROISM OF HORACE BELL — ADJUSTMENT OF THE 

xxiii 



XXIV CONTENTS 

CONTROVERSY WHICH PROMISED TO END IN WAR — STATUS OF 
SLAVEHOLDERS AS TO WAR — STANLEY YOUNG KILLS COLONEL 
MARSH. 

CHAPTER VI— THE LINCOLN -DOUGLAS DEBATES . . 92 

LINCOLN'S "house DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF " SPEECH, WHICH 
LED TO THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES — THE PRETEXT FOR 
SECESSION — THE DRED SCOTT CASE — MR. LINCOLN'S ASSAULT 
ON CHIEF JUSTICE TANEY — THE DRED SCOTT CASE AS PART OF 
THE abolitionists' SYSTEM OF AGITATION AND REVOLUTION. 

CHAPTER VII — ELECTED TO INDIANA LEGISLATURE . no 

GRESHAM A DELEGATE TO REPUBLICAN STATE CONVENTION — 
CONTEST BETWEEN LANE AND MORTON — DIVISION OF 
DEMOCRATIC PARTY — CHARLESTON CONVENTION — DEBATE 
BETWEEN JEFFERSON DAVIS AND STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS — 
NOMINATION OF DOUGLAS AT BALTIMORE — NOMINATION OF 
ABRAHAM LINCOLN AT CHICAGO CONVENTION — GRESHAM 
REPUBLICAN NOMINEE FOR LEGISLATURE — DEFEATS HANCOCK 
— LINCOLN ELECTED AS PRESIDENT. 

CHAPTER VIII — UNION SPEECHES IN KENTUCKY . .121 

SECESSION — GRESHAM MAKES UNION SPEECHES IN KENTUCKY 
— RESOLUTIONS DEPRECATING SECESSION OF SOUTH CAROLINA — 
HENRY clay's SPEECH IN DEBATE ON THE COMPROMISE OF 1850 
— USED BY GRESHAM — CRITTENDEN's RESOLUTIONS IN SENATE 
FOR AMENDMENT OF CONSTITUTION TO SETTLE CONTROVERSY 
BETWEEN NORTH AND SOUTH — GEORGE D. PRENTICe'S POSI- 
TION AND VIEWS AS EXPRESSED IN NEWSPAPER EDITORIALS — 
KENTUCKY ADOPTS NEUTRALITY AND STAYS IN UNION. 

CHAPTER IX — INDIANA PREPARES FOR WAR . . . .129 

FIRST SESSION OF INDI.\NA LEGISLATURE — RESOLUTIONS ON 
THE STATE AND THE UNION — GRESHAM REPRESENTS THE 
"traitor" HEFFRON in KENTUCKY COURTS ^ PEACE CON- 
FERENCE — WENDELL Phillips's speech — abolitionists 

WOULD not compromise — GRESHAM CHAIRMAN MILITARY 
committee of the house, AND COLONEL ON GOVERNOR'S 
STAFF — CRITTENDEN RESOLUTIONS— GRESHAM's BREACH WITH 
GOVERNOR MORTON — SPECIAL SESSION OF INDIANA LEGISLA- 
TURE — GRESHAM PUTS THROUGH BILL VESTING APPOINTMENT 
OF FIELD AND LINE OFFICERS OF REGIMENTS IN HANDS OF 
GOVERNOR. 



CONTENTS XXV 

CHAPTER X— OPENING OF THE WAR 146 

WALTER Q. GRESHAM ENLISTS AS A PRIVATE — KENTUCKY 
LEGISLATURE ADJOURNS — REBEL VICTORY AT BULL RUN — 
CRITTENDEN RESOLUTIONS PUT THROUGH CONGRESS — WAR 
TO PRESERVE THE UNION — KENTUCKY STAYS WITH THE NORTH 
— END OF NEUTRALITY — GRESHAM COMMISSIONED LIEUTENANT- 
COLONEL OF THIRTY-EIGHTH INDIANA VOLUNTEERS — LOUIS- 
VILLE "courier" SUPPRESSED — WAR BEGUN — BUCKNER 
INVADES KENTUCKY — WHY HE DID NOT GET TO LOUISVILLE — 
GRESHAM MEETS SHERMAN — KENTUCKY LEGISLATURE CALLS 
FOR 40,000 SOLDIERS — LETTERS FROM KENTUCKY CAMPS — 
GRESHAM STUDIES HARD — ON PICKET DUTY — SUFFERING OF 
WOMEN AT HOME — GRESHAM TENDERED COLONELCY OE FIFTY- 
THIRD INDIANA REGIMENT. 

CHAPTER XI — FIFTY-THIRD INDIANA VOLUNTEERS . 16S 

ORGANIZATION OF THE REGIMENT — GRESHAM FIRST COLONEL — 
THE FIFTY-THIRD GUARDS PRISONERS CAPTURED AT FORT 
DONELSON — GOES DOWN MISSISSIPPI RIVER TO JOIN GENERAL 
GRANT — SICKNESS IN CAMP — REGIMENT GOES UP OHIO AND 
TENNESSEE RIVERS TOWARD SAVANNAH. 

CHAPTER XII— THE BATTLE OF SHILOH 175 

FIRST MEETING WITH GENERAL GRANT — GRESHAM COMMANDS 
POST AND BRIGADE AT SAVANNAH — GRANT's ARMY WORSTED 
BUT NOT DEFEATED IN FIRST DAY's FIGHT — GRANT PROTECTS 
SHERMAN — GRANT RELIEVED OF HIS COMMAND — RAWLINS' 
SECRET REPORTS CAUSE MR. LINCOLN TO RESTORE GRANT TO 
COMMAND — COURT MARTIAL OF COLONEL WORTHINGTON. 

CHAPTER XIII— CORINTH AND MEMPHIS 186 

SIEGE AND EVACUATION OF CORINTH — MEMPHIS EVACUATED — 
GENERAL GRANT OPENS UP VICKSBURG CAMPAIGN — SHERMAn'S 

movement down the river — fourth of july in the con- 
federacy — gresham does the talking — robert dale 
Owen's letter to secretary chase on abolition — inter- 
nal CONDITIONS in GRANT'S ARMY — HOW ABOLITIONISM WAS 
BROUGHT ABOUT — AT COLLIERVILLE — GRESHAM DEVELOPS 
TYPHOID — RIFT BETWEEN GRESHAM AND GOVERNOR MORTON 
WIDENED. 

CHAPTER XIV — BEFORE VICKSBURG 218 

THE TAKING OF VICKSBURG — COLONEL GRESHAM's LETTERS 
FROM THE FRONT, WRITTEN FROM MAY 1 5, 1863, TO CLOSE 
OF THE SIEGE. 



xxvi CONTENTS 

CHAPTER XV — MORGAN'S RAID 229 

morgan's reasons for his raid into INDIANA — COUNTED ON 
AID FROM SYMPATHIZERS NORTH OF THE OHIO RIVER— MORGAN 
CAPTURES TWO STEAMERS AND CROSSES THE RIVER — THE 
DEFENSE OF CORYDON — CARE OF CONFEDERATE WOUNDED. 

CHAPTER XVI — NATCHEZ IN 1863 239 

COLONIAL HOMES OF NATCHEZ — "ROSALIE," GRANT's HEAD- 
QUARTERS — GRESHAM IN COMMAND OF NATCHEZ — COTTON A 
CAUSE OF DOWNFALL OF CONFEDERACY — EFFECT OF ENLIST- 
MENT OF NEGROES — GRESHAM ENFORCES LAW AND ORDER — 
PRESERVES RIGHTS OF NONCOMBATANTS — PROCLAMATION OF 
AMNESTY AND PARDON — MORTALITY AMONG CONTRABANDS 
WHO FLOCKED TO THE TOWNS — RECONSTRUCTION BEGUN. 

CHAPTER XVII— MINOR CAMPAIGNS— RE-ENLISTMENTS 265 

HARMFUL PROLONGATION OF THE WAR — AMERICA'S OBLIGATION 
TO OTHER LANDS — UNION REVERSE AT CHICKAMAUGA — MERI- 
DIAN EXPEDITION LED BY GENERAL SHERMAN — WARFARE IN 
MISSISSIPPI AND LOUISIANA — CONFEDERATES THREATEN 
NATCHEZ — GENERAL GRESHAM COMMANDS EXPEDITION AGAINST 
FORT ADAMS — DANGERS OF MISSISSIPPI RIVER TRAVEL — THE 
MERIDIAN EXPEDITION — THIRTEENTH AMENDMENT RATIFIED 
BY SENATE, BUT OPPOSED IN THE HOUSE — RE-ENLISTMENT OF 
VETERANS. 

CHAPTER XVIII— THE ATLANTA CAMPAIGN . . . .294 

GRESHAM APPOINTED TO TAKE CROCKER's COMMAND — BATTLE 
OF KENESAW MOUNTAIN^ A SOLDIER'S VIEW OF THE DIFFER- 
ence between grant and sherman as commanders — 
gresham wounded at atlanta — carried to new albany 
— Mcpherson's death — gresham disabled for five years. 

CHAPTER XIX — NEGRO SUFFRAGE 313 

general gresham's many visitors — thirteenth amend- 
ment submitted to states for ratification — eliminate 

SLAVERY without COMPENSATION — LINCOLN RECONSTRUCTS 
LOUISIANA — SUMNER OPPOSES RECOGNITION OF LOUISIANA 
STATE GOVERNMENT — SOLDIERS OPPOSED TO NEGRO SUFFRAGE 
— SHERMAN'S OPPOSITION — LINCOLN'S ASSASSINATION — 
GRESHAM FOR COMPLETE AMNESTY — THE FOURTEENTH AMEND- 
MENT TO THE CONSTITUTION — SOLDIER VOTE RATIFIES IT — 
GRESHAM A SOLDIER ORATOR — CANDIDATE FOR CONGRESS — 



CONTENTS xxvii 

MORTON AND GRESHAM OPPOSE NEGRO SUFFRAGE — GRESHAM 
DEFEATED FOR CONGRESS BUT ELECTED STATE AGENT — 
MORTON ELECTED TO SENATE — MORTON VOTES TO INCORPORATE 
NEGRO SUFFRAGE INTO RECONSTRUCTION ACTS. 

CHAPTER XX— CANDIDATE FOR CONGRESS AND DE- 
CLINES SENATORSHIP 341 

GRESHAM RESUMES PRACTICE OF LAW — AGAIN DEFEATED AS 
CANDIDATE FOR CONGRESS — ADVOCATES RATIFICATION OF 
FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT — OPPOSES THE FIFTEENTH AMEND- 
MENT — REFUSES TO BE CANDIDATE FOR UNITED STATES SENA- 
TOR — DECLINES grant's OFFER TO BE COLLECTOR OF PORT 
OF NEW ORLEANS. 

CHAPTER XXI— UNITED STATES DISTRICT JUDGE . . 349 

APPOINTED UNITED STATES DISTRICT JUDGE FOR INDIANA — A 
BELIEVER IN ARBITRATION OF LEG.A.L DISPUTES — EQUITY 
PROCEDURE — PATENT CASES — THE NATIONAL BANKRUPTCY 
ACT OF 1867 — UPHOLDS TRIAL BY JURY — JUDGE GRESHAM's 
METHODS WITH THE JURY. 

CHAPTER XXII— RAILROAD RECEIVERSHIPS 366 

MONON ROAD DIFFICULTIES — RAILWAY MORTGAGES UNLIKE 
OTHER MORTGAGES — SUPREME COURT UPHOLDS JUDGE DRUM- 
MOND's CONCLUSION AS TO RAILWAYS BEING PUBLIC CON- 
CERNS' — LEGISLATION CONCERNING PUBLIC SERVICE CORPO- 
RATIONS. 

CHAPTER XXIII— THE GREAT RAILROAD STRIKE OF 77 379 

CAUSES LEADING UP TO THE STRIKE — REDUCTION OF WAGES 
OF RAILROAD EMPLOYEES — STRIKE BEGINS IN WEST VIRGINIA 
— SPREADS TO PITTSBURGH AND INDIANAPOLIS — JUDGE GRES- 
HAM PREPARES TO HANDLE THE SITUATION — APPOINTS OLD 
SOLDIERS UNITED STATES MARSHALS TO PROTECT PROPERTY 
AND MOVE TRAINS — MILITARY ORGANIZATION EFFECTED TO 
SUPPORT MARSHALS — POWER OF FEDERAL COURTS CONSIDERED 
—ARREST OF STRIKERS WHO INTERFERED WITH MOVEMENT OF 
TRAINS ON ROADS OPERATED BY RECEIVERS. 

CHAPTER XXIV — TRIALS FOR CONTEMPT OF COURT . 402 

JUDGE DRUMMOND TAKES UP OHIO & MISSISSIPPI LINE CASES 
FIRST — THE TERRE HAUTE CASES — ^CONTROVERSY OVER WAR- 
REN N. SAYER — PUNISHMENT OF THE STRIKERS. 



xxviii CONTENTS 

CHAPTER XXV — BURLINGTON STRIKE AND DEBS'S 

REBELLION 409 

STRIKE VOTED ON THE BURLINGTON ROAD — OTHER ROADS 

REFUSE Burlington's freight — receiver of wabash com- 
pany INVOLVED — interpretation OF INTERSTATE COMMERCE 
ACT — GENERAL STRIKE AVOIDED — AMENDMENT OF INTER- 
STATE COMMERCE ACT — PULLMAN STRIKE, OR "dEBS'S REBEL- 
LION" — INTERFERENCE WITH MAIL TRAINS — CLEVELAND'S 
PROCLAMATION AND MILES'S PROMPT ACTION SUPPRESS DIS- 
ORDER. 

CHAPTER XXVI — THE GREENBACK CONTENTION IN 

INDIANA POLITICS 420 

THE MONEY QUESTION — LEGAL TENDER DECISIONS — CONSTI- 
TUTIONALITY OF GREENBACKS — WHAT IS MONEY? — PASSAGE 
OF THE "public DEBT ACt" — DEMOCRATIC VICTORY OF 1 874 — 
HENRY WATTERSON, THOMAS A. HENDRICKS, AND DANIEL W. 
VOORHEES — RESUMPTION OF SPECIE PAYMENTS — REISSUE OF 
PAPER — ^ DISCUSSION OF THE LAST LEGAL TENDER DECISION, 
THAT OF 1884 — A CABINET DINNER PARTY IN WASHINGTON. 

CHAPTER XXVII — "WHISKEY RING" TRIALS . . . .437 

BRISTOW MADE SECRETARY OF TREASURY — INTERNAL REVENUE 
FRAUDS — THE " WHISKEY RING" — GRESHAM BREAKS THE 
WHISKEY men's DEFENSE — BREACH WITH GENERAL HARRISON 

— GRESHAm's PRINCIPLE OF CONSTITUTIONAL CONSTRUCTION 
NOT APPROVED BY BENJAMIN HARRISON NOR SUPREME COURT 

— SUBSEQUENTLY UPHELD — THE COUNSELMAN CASE — BROWN- 
LEE TRIAL — GRESHAM'S CLEMENCY. 

CHAPTER XXVIII— THE ELECTION OF 1S76 454 

GRESHAM OFFERED REPUBLICAN NOMINATION FOR GOVERNOR 

— CORRUPTION IN INTERIOR AND WAR DEPARTMENTS — 
JUDICIAL POWER OF CONGRESS — GRESHAM SUPPORTS GEN- 
ERAL BRISTOW'S CLAIMS FOR THE PRESIDENCY — POLITICAL 
TACTICS — OPPOSED TO THE USE OF BAYONETS AT SOUTHERN 
POLLS — THE HAYES-TILDEN CONTEST. 

CHAPTER XXIX— REUNIONS OF ARMY OF THE TEN- 
NESSEE 462 

ORGANIZATION OF THE SOCIETY OF THE ARMY OF THE TENNES- 
SEE — REUNIONS AT ST. PAUL, INDIANAPOLIS, AND CHICAGO — 
CIVIL AND MILITARY CELEBRITIES IN ATTENDANCE — GENERAL 

GRESHAM DELIVERS ANNUAL ADDRESS IN 1 879 — ENUNCIATES 

CONVICTIONS ON SOUTHERN POLITY. 



CONTENTS xxix 

CHAPTER XXX— ELECTION FRAUD CASES 472 

THE ENFORCEMENT ACTS — POLITICS IN THE JURY BOX — STATE 
ELECTION CONSPIRACIES — CRIMES AGAINST POPULAR GOVERN- 
MENT — THE CONSTITUTIONALITY OF ENFORCEMENT ACTS UP- 
HELD — WAR LEGISLATION DID NOT DESTROY THE STATES OR 
LOCAL SELF-GOVERNMENT — THE COY AND MACKIN CASES. 

CHAPTER XXXI — IN PRESIDENT ARTHUR'S CABINET . 489 

GRESHAM APPOINTED POSTMASTER-GENERAL — AGREEABLE 
NEIGHBORS IN WASHINGTON — EXCLUDES LOUISIANA LOTTERY 
FROM UNITED STATES MAILS — SUIT FOR DAMAGES — ADVISES 
CONGRESS TO AMEND ITS LAWS — LOTTERY SUPPRESSED — BLAINE 
AND ARTHUR RIVALS — OFFER OF BLAINE TO GRESHAM DECLINED 
— BLAINE NOMINATED BY REPUBLICANS — GRESHAM MADE 
SECRETARY OF TREASURY — CUSTOMS DUTIES — WAR TARIFF. 

CHAPTER XXXII— ON THE BENCH AGAIN 504 

BECOMES CIRCUIT JUDGE FOR SEVENTH DISTRICT — INTIMACY 
WITH PRESIDENT CLEVELAND — MELVILLE W. FULLER'S APPOINT- 
MENT AS CHIEF JUSTICE OF THE SUPREME COURT — CORDIAL 
RELATIONS OF HARLAN AND GRESHAM — THE SUPREME COURT'S 
IGNORANCE OF PATENT LITIGATION — THE LAWTHER-HAMILTON 
CASE. 

CHAPTER XXXIII— THE PULLMAN PALACE CAR PAT- 
ENT CASES 518 

THE SESSIONS IMPROVEMENT IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF RAIL- 
ROAD CARS — ADOPTED BY THE PULLMAN COMPANY — THE 
PULLMAN COMPANY ENJOINS THE WAGNER COMPANY FROM 
USING THE SESSIONS IMPROVEMENT — HEARING BEFORE JUDGES 
GRESHAM AND BLODGETT — PULLMAN COMPANY SUES VARIOUS 
RAILROADS — GRESHAM'S FAMOUS OPINION — CONSOLIDATION OF 
THE PULLMAN AND WAGNER COMPANIES. 

CHAPTER XXXIV — IS "EQUITY A ROGUISH THING?" . 530 

THE CELEBRATED ANGLE CASE — H. C. ANGLE UNDERTAKES TO 
CONSTRUCT THE ST. CROIX RAILROAD FOR THE PORTAGE COM- 
PANY — PLEDGES HIS PROPERTY TO CARRY OUT HIS CONTRACT — 
THE OMAHA AND ST. PAUL RAILROAD COMPANIES COVET THE 
RICH TIMBER LANDS GRANTED TO THE PORTAGE COMPANY BY 
THE GOVERNMENT — SENATOR SPOONER's VICIOUS ADVICE TO 
THE OMAHA COMPANY — THE ST. PAUL RAILROAD SUES THE 
OMAHA COMPANY FOR ITS SHARE OF THE ST. CROIX LANDS — 



XXX CONTENTS 

ACTION OF THE WISCONSIN LEGISLATURE IN THE MATTER — 
angle's WIDOW SUES THE PORTAGE COMPANY BEFORE JUDGE 
GRESHAM — WINS THE SUIT WHICH IS RETRIED BY JUSTICE 
HARLAN — HIS DECISION. 

CHAPTER XXXV— THE WABASH CASE 55° 

ITS EFFECT ON INTERSTATE COMMERCE LAW — JAY GOULD'S 
WRECKING SCHEMES — REMOVAL OF RECEIVERS OF THE WABASH 
RAILROAD — WABASH DECISION MAKES A GREAT STIR — RE- 
BATES, PREFERENCES, AND DISCRIMINATIONS PUT UNDER BAN 
OF STATUTE LAW. 

CHAPTER XXXVI — EVENTS PRIOR TO '88 CONVENTION 561 

BLAINE AGAIN CANDIDATE FOR PRESIDENT — REDUCING THE 
TREASURY SURPLUS — CLEVELAND'S TARIFF MESSAGE — EDITOR 
JOSEPH MEDILL's POSITION ON THE TARIFF — BLAINE WITH- 
DRAWS AS CANDIDATE — GRESHAM BOOM — JUDGE GRESHAM 
REFUSES TO MAKE TERMS WITH PLATT AND QUAY — PLATT'S 
POWER IN THE CONVENTION. 

CHAPTER XXXVIl— THE REPUBLICAN CONVENTION 

OF 1888 584 

CONTEST FOR TEMPORARY CHAIRMAN— MR. THURSTON ELECTED 
— ESTEE MADE PERMANENT CHAIRMAN — JUDGE GRESHAM 
DISLIKES PLATFORM ADOPTED — " TIN BUCKET" PARADE FOR 
GRESHAM — LEONARD SWETT PRESENTS GRESHAm's NAME TO 
THE CONVENTION — INGERSOLL's SPEECH FOR GRESHAM — 
OTHER NAMES PRESENTED — PLATT "DEMONSTRATES HIS 
power" — QUAY ELECTED CHAIRMAN OF THE NATIONAL COM- 
MITTEE —HARRISON'S STRENGTH — GENERAL HARRISON NOMI- 
NATED. 

CHAPTER XXXVIII -THE "BLOCKS OF FIVE" CASE . . 602 
Harrison's campaign for votes — Dudley's "blocks of 
five" letter — need for reform of election laws — 

BLAINE MADE SECRETARY OF STATE — FRICTION WITH THE 

PRESIDENT— Dudley's threats to expose campaign secrets 
— reasons why he was not indicted — claypool made 
district attorney— he soon resigns— criticism of judge 
WOODS — legislation repealed. 
CHAPTER XXXIX— THE WABASH CASE AGAIN . . .619 

HARRISON ASKED TO APPOINT GRESHAM TO VACANCY ON THE 
supreme BENCH — refuses TO MAKE THE APPOINTMENT — 



CONTENTS xxxi 

DAWN OF "populist" PARTY — JUDGE BREWER MADE A 
JUSTICE OF THE SUPREME COURT — THE "NARROW GAUGE" 
CASE — JUDGE GRESHAM's DECISION REVERSED BY JUSTICE 
BREWER — THE PEOPLE'S PARTY FORMALLY ORGANIZED — 
VICTORIOUS IN FIRST STATE ELECTION — SENDS "SOCKLESS 
jerry" SIMPSON TO CONGRESS — THE CHICAGO AND ATLAN- 
TIC CASE. 

CHAPTER XL— SHERMAN ACT AND McKINLEY BILL 632 

THE SHERMAN ANTI-TRUST ACT — THE CASE OF RICHARDSON VS. 
ALGER — -THE SHERMAN SILVER BILL — THE MCKINLEY BILL — 
THE WHISKEY TRUST — THE "INFERNAL MACmNE " PLOT — 

POST OFFICE INSPECTOR JAMES E. STEWART — WHY THE 

PROSECUTION OF THE WHISKEY TRUST FAILED — THE SUGAR 
TRUST CASE — OTHER PROSECUTIONS. 

CHAPTER XLI— JUDGE GRESHAM'S VIEWS ON POPU- 
LAR GOVERNMENT 655 

SPEECH AT THE DEDICATION OF THE GRANT MONUMENT, CHIC.4G0 
— POLITICS AND GOVERNMENT OF THE TIMES DENOUNCED — 
BANQUET OF THE SOCIETY OF THE ARMY OF THE TENNESSEE — 
NOTED SPEAKERS — PLAN TO DEFEAT HARRISON'S RENOMINA- 
TION — people's party WANT GRESHAM AS A CANDIDATE FOR 
PRESIDENT — HE DECLINES. 

CHAPTER XLII — DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION OF 1892 . 664 

GROVER CLEVELAND NOMINATED FOR PRESIDENT — THE PLAT- 
FORM — THE TARIFF " PLANK " CAUSES MAJORITY AND MINORITY 
REPORTS — THE MINORITY REPORT ADOPTED AS THE PLATFORM. 

CHAPTER XLIII — SECRETARY OF STATE 669 

GRESHAM VOTES FOR CLEVELAND — AGREES WITH HIM ON 
TARIFF — CRAWFORD FAIRBANKS ASSEMBLES COMPETING MANU- 
FACTURING PLANTS — GRESHAM PUBLICLY STATES POLITICAL 
POSITION — ^DEMOCRATIC COMMITTEE AND PEOPLE'S PARTY GET 
IN TOUCH — CLEVELAND ELECTED — FINANCIAL PANIC — CLEVE- 
LAND OFFERS GRESHAM SECRETARYSHIP OF STATE — GRESHAM 
DECLINES, THEN ACCEPTS — CONFERENCE AT LAKEWOOD — 
POPULARITY WITH SOUTHERNERS. 

CHAPTER XLIV— CABINET LIFE IN CLEVELAND'S SEC- 
OND ADMINISTRATION 688 

MR. GRESHAM WARMLY WELCOMED IN WASHINGTON — MATTERS 
OF PRECEDENCE — MRS. CLEVELAND'S INFORMALITY — THE 



XXxii CONTENTS 

nation's royal SPANISH GUESTS — DELIGHTFUL RELATIONS 
WITH DIPLOMATS AND THEIR WIVES — RIVALRY BETWEEN 
FRENCH AND ENGLISH MINISTERS — CHINESE MINISTER'S WIFE 
APPEARS IN PUBLIC — MR. CLEVELAND OPENS WORLD's FAIR. 

CHAPTER XLY— SILVER AND THE TARIFF 701 

REPEAL OF SHERMAN SILVER ACT — VOLNEY T. MALOTT, INDI- 
ANAPOLIS BANKER, URGES PRESERVATION OF INTEGRITY OF 
THE TREASURY — CONGRESS PROVIDES FOR COINAGE OF NINE 
MILLION DOLLARS OF SILVER BULLION IN TREASURY — BRYAN 
MAKES BRILLL\NT DECORATION DAY ADDRESS — DEMOCRATIC 
NATIONAL CONVENTION AT CHICAGO —BRYAN'S GREAT SILVER 
SPEECH — CLEVELAND AUTHORIZES SALE OF UNITED STATES 
BONDS TO REPLENISH THE GOLD RESERVE — WILSON-GORMAN 
TARIFF ACT. 

CHAPTER XLVI — BERING SEA ARBITRATION . . . .717 

FUR SEAL RIGHTS ON PRIBILOF ISLANDS — BLAINE AND HARRISON 
NOT IN ACCORD — MR. BAYARD's WISE COURSE OF ACTION — 
NEUTRAL ARBITRATORS DECIDE THE BERING SEA CASE — THE 
UNITED STATES DEFEATED — SECRETARY GRESHAM TAKES 
STEPS TO GET RID OF THE PARIS TRIBUNAL REGULATIONS. 

CHAPTER XLVII— HAWAII 738 

HOUSE BILL PASSED REPEALING ENFORCEMENT ACTS AND OTHER 
FEDERAL STATUTES — REVOLT IN HAWAII — INTERFERENCE WITH 
NATIVE GOVERNMENT PROHIBITED — ANNEXATION TREATY 
TRANSMITTED AND WITHDRAWN — QUEEN REFUSES CONDI- 
TIONAL RESTORATION— FINALLY ACCEDES TO AMNESTY — CON- 
DEMNATION OF PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT — UNITED STATES 
ADOPTS POLICY OF NON-INTERVENTION — GRESHAM'S STATES- 
MANSHIP — FIRST TO ST.A.ND FOR THE RIGHTS OF THE LITTLE 
NATION. 

CHAPTER XLVIII— BRAZIL, NICARAGUA, AND CUBA . 777 
insurrection in brazil — naval revolt — united states 
intervenes — monarchy prevented — great britain with- 
draws pretensions to sovereignty in nicaragua — 
revolution in the mosquito strip against nicaraguan 
authority — united states enforces payment of great 
Britain's claims upon Nicaragua — investigation of Vene- 
zuelan QUESTION — SPANISH GUNBOAT FIRES ON UNITED 
states mail ship OFF CUBA — .SPAIN APOLOGIZES — CHINESE- 
JAPANESE WAR. 



CONTENTS xxxiii 
CHAPTER XLIX — THE END 7qo 

LAST ILLNESS AND DEATH — INTERMENT IN ARLINGTON CEME- 
TERY — DISPOSITION OF STATE MATTERS PENDING — SETTLE- 
MENT OP THE VENEZUELAN CONTROVERSY FOLLOWS LINES LAID 
DOWN BY SECRETARY GRESHAM — HIS POLITICAL CONVICTIONS- 
OPPOSED TO IMPERIALISM AND ITS ACCOMPANIMENT, WAR — 
NOT A NON-RESISTANT — FIRST TO STAND FOR THE RIGHTS OF 
THE LITTLE NATION— BELIEVED JUSTICE THE END AND AIM OF 
GOVERNMENT — LIFE PLANS ENDED BY HIS DEATH. 

APPENDICES 8i8 

INDEX 841 



LIFE OF 

WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

1832—1895 



VOLUME I 



CHAPTER I 
BIRTH. ANCESTRY. AND EARLY YEARS 



MRS. GRESHAM's birth AND ANCESTRY — CONDITIONS IN 
KENTUCKY IN THE '40's AND '50's — HER FATHER'S RELIGION 
AND POLITICS — MEETS WALTER Q. GRESHAM, A LAW STU- 
DENT AT CORYDON — HIS BIRTH AND ANCESTRY — ACCOUNT 
OF "old UNCLE DENNIS " PENNINGTON, ONE OF INDIANA'S 

first settlers and foremost anti-slavery men — 
Pennington's long legislative career — change of 
Indiana's capital from vincennes to corydon — Har- 
rison county's first settler, major JOHN HARBISON 

— RESCUE OF Harbison's stepchildren from the 

INDIANS — GRESHAM's SCHOOL DAYS, STUDY OF LAW AND 
admission to the bar — HIS PARTNERSHIP WITH T. C. 
SLAUGHTER — EARLY PRACTICE. 

I WAS born in Louisville, Kentucky, February ii, 1839. 
Thomas McGrain, my father, was a native of Dubhn, 
Ireland. After the execution of Robert Emmet, my grand- 
father kept up his opposition to the British government 
until he learned that if he would escape prosecution, and 
perhaps the fate of his leader, he must leave his native land, 
SO he fled to America. He brought with him his two sons 

— Thomas, my father, then seven, and James, two years 
younger — and settled at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was 
planned that my grandmother, Catherine Bacon McGrain, 



2 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

and the two daughters, Ehza and Marie, who were older 
than the boys, should follow when a home had been pre- 
pared. But they never came. Instead, on the death of 
my grandfather, which occurred a few years after his 
arrival in Pittsburgh, they accepted the invitation of my 
grandmother's only brother. Major Matthew Bacon, an 
unmarried man. to make their home with him in Dublin. 

Matthew Bacon had entered the British army in early 
youth as an ensign, served his crown loyally through many 
grades, mostly in India, until retired as a major, and then 
lived to a ripe old age. He died in 1867, at No. 3 Hume 
Street, Dublin, surviving his sister and nieces. After their 
death my Uncle Matthew wrote, in 1862, that while he would 
liberally remember his church (the Roman Catholic), he 
did not propose to leave it his all, and he wanted my sister. 
Lyde, to come and cheer his declining days. She went to 
Dublin, lived Math him until he died, and then remained 
there. My father said he was glad to have my sister go 
because it closed the family breach that had existed since 
Emmet's time. Matthew Bacon's sympathies, like those 
of many British subjects, whether Englishmen or Irish, 
during our family quarrel, as I prefer to call "The War of 
the Rebellion" or "The War between the States," went with 
the American government, and he was much gratified that 
my husband went into the "Yankee" army. Thus he ran 
counter not only to the views of his government, but also 
to the views of his nephew, my father, and of his grand- 
niece. I early learned that we should be tolerant of the 
opinions of others and that pohtical views never should, 
as they too often do, mar social relations. 

My grandfather left some money to his two sons, which 
their guardian appropriated to his own use. That inbred 
Irish spirit of revolt and his strong trait of self-reHance 
prompted my father, while yet in his early teens, to lead his 
brother from the guardian's home. They went to work for 
a tinner, the first opening that presented itself. They soon 



BIRTH, ANCESTRY, AND EARLY YEARS 3 

learned the trade, and before his majority my father had a 
shop of his own. He prospered, and in due time married 
Matilda Reed, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister from 
the north of Ireland. From Pittsburgh, with his young 
wife, he moved to Frankfort, Kentucky, where he estab- 
lished a tin and hardware store. His business prospered at 
Frankfort, but he wanted a larger field, so he moved to 
Louisville, where he built a foundry for the manufacture of 
stoves. The Louisville venture succeeded from the start. 
We first lived on Second Street, in the house still standing 
next to Christ Church on the north. It was there I was 
born. 

My father was born a Roman Catholic, but had become 
a Methodist. Later on he became a Presbyterian, through 
the influence of my maternal grandmother, Jane Gray, who 
lived with us. But with all my father's changes of religion, 
he never entirely lost his predilection for and connection 
with the Roman Catholic church. Every Christmas he 
gave a present to all the Catholic orphans in town. For a 
time he sent several of my sisters and myself to a Roman 
Catholic convent at Bardstown, Kentucky. 

One day my father brought home with him, from the 
Catholic orphan asylum, a boy named Daniel G. Grifiin, 
who had come to work in the store. His parents were Irish 
immigrants, who had settled for a time in Nova Scotia, but 
died soon after they reached Louisville. I remember my 
mother saying, "We have eight children now; don't you 
think we have enough without adopting others?" His 
answer was Irish: "But, my dear, I was an orphan once 
myself." That settled it. Dan was received into the 
family, educated with the rest of us, and sent to the Ken- 
tucky MiHtary Institute along with my brother Tom. 
The only time he ever crossed my father was when he 
"went in" as Adjutant of the 38th Indiana Volunteers. 
Before his death and before the close of the war, he was a 
brevet brigadier general of volunteers. 



4 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

While my father was a pro-slavery man, he was not, at 
least at the start, wedded to the system. He early took to 
other kinds of property than the few slaves he owned. I 
only remember Horace, the porter in the store, and a few 
household servants — Winnie Johnson, the cook, her son, 
Booze, and a couple of maid servants. I called Winn 
"Mammy." She was always my friend, and made me the 
confidant of all her secrets, except who was Booze's father. 
My mother with her Pennsylvania training never could 
comprehend the negro character, and was not unlike many 
a woman who had even been reared among them, no match 
for them in finesse. 

In politics my father was a Whig and a great admirer of 
Henry Clay. On the occasion of one of Mr. Clay's visits 
to Louisville — it was before 1850 — my father took my 
eldest brother, one of my sisters, and myself to a reception 
at the Louisville Hotel to see him. I still remember how 
gracious Mr. Clay was to me, a small girl. When the Whig 
party broke up and the American or Know-Nothing party 
took its place in Kentucky, my father became a Democrat, 
and later, after the assaults of the Abolitionists, an extreme 
pro-slavery man and Secessionist. 

One summer we occupied the country place of General, 
afterwards President, Zachary Taylor, a few miles east of 
Louisville on the Ohio River. It was considered an old place 
even then. It was built in 1790 by Richard Taylor, a Vir- 
ginian by birth, one of Kentucky's early leading citizens and 
the father of Zachary Taylor. It still stands well preserved. 

There was a path the darkies had, near to and up and 
down the river, with by-paths which they traveled at night 
from one place to another. The whole family, including 
the darkies, lived well. My father's business often took him 
to New Orleans. He sent us thence oysters by the barrel, 
bananas by the bunch, and venison by the quarter. Many 
were the midnight suppers old Winn had in the kitchen. 
While my father was a most liberal provider, he insisted 



BIRTH, ANCESTRY,- AND EARLY YEARS 5 

on young girls eating light suppers. Often I would get up 
in the night and partake of Winn's spread. "Just starvin' 
the chilun to death," she would say. And then when I 
would not want to get up in the morning and could eat 
nothing, my father was sure I had eaten too much supper. 
But he never knew about the second supper. Old Winn 
was an excellent cook but never had a recipe. After I was 
grown I asked her for one. Her answer was, "I ain't got 
no receipt." "How do you cook without a recipe?" I 
inquired. "I jest makes things accordin' to what I'se got," 
was her reply. We liked the Taylor place so well we stayed 
there a year. I remember that at Christmas I saw and 
enjoyed eggnog for the first time. 

The taste for countr}^ life thus acciuired led my father, 
on October 10, 1849, to trade with Colonel Peter Kintner 
for the Cedar Glade Farm, near Corydon, Indiana. A store 
on Main Street in Louisville was given for the farm. Of 
course, the Colonel got the better of the bargain. He was 
able to live in ease in Paris on the rental of the store, which 
enhanced in value as the years went by, while we lived in 
Louisville and on the farm, and kept open house at both 
places. 

By the middle of the '50's we gave up our Louisville 
residence, but my father continued in business there until 
1862. My father was not a sharp trader; he never made 
money that way. He was an easy master. He made it 
possible for Horace to buy his freedom. Horace was an 
educated darke3^ and the superintendent of a colored Sun- 
day school in Louisville. Before his freedom I often went 
with him to teach a class of eight httle mulatto girls, 
pretty and almost white. Several were the daughters of 
their masters. 

There was not much severity or physical cruelty visited 
on the slaves in Louisville or in that part of Kentucky with 
which I was familiar. The fear of being sold down the river 
was a great deterrent influence on the slave, and pubhc 



6 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

opinion had its restraining influence on the master. A 
sale "down the river" always created a great commotion 
among the slaves and the children. The slaves never pro- 
tested to the masters, but the latter always heard of it, for 
the white children never failed to carry the statements made 
by the slaves to the elders, would ask questions, and avow 
their sympathy in terms that hurt more than the assaults 
of the Abolitionists, who, we were taught, were fiends 
incarnate. 

Winnie, our cook, and her son Booze went with us to 
Indiana. The boy remained there and thus secured his 
freedom. While Winnie was in Indiana she was free, but 
a slave when she returned with us to Kentucky — a status 
that illustrates the Dred Scott case. But Winnie was only 
a nominal slave; when she tired of Corydon she would go 
to Louisville. She died there shortly before the breaking 
out of the war. One day, when he was making a fire, Booze 
showed me the inside of his hand and said: "See, Miss 
Tillie, I'se getting white. I '11 be white same as you when I 
gets to heaven." Flint indeed would have been the heart 
that would not have been touched by such a plaint! And 
the generous sentiments of the child were reflected in the 
utterances of the early Southern jurists. 

The Massachusetts Abolitionists like Wendell Phillips 
were not the only men who at that time realized that slavery 
was a mistake from an economic standpoint. My father 
saw it, and it was partly to get away from slavery that he 
bought his Indiana farm; and yet he became a violent 
Secessionist. There were men in Kentucky who had in- 
herited slaves, but who, aside from the question of morals, 
preferred other kinds of property because they regarded it 
as more profitable and safer. They converted their market- 
able darkies into other property. The movement down the 
river was narrowing slave property. And in the Cotton 
States the negroes were as well cared for as in Kentucky. 
They were too valuable animals not to have the best of 



BIRTH, ANCESTRY, AND EARLY YEARS 7 

medical attention. The aged and infirm the Kentuckians 
could not sell, and they could not emancipate them without 
giving a bond that they would not become pubhc charges. 
The bond involved Habilities that young men did not Hke 
to incur. They coined the expression "nigger man," which 
they applied to the man who owned large numbers of 
slaves. But the great mass of the large slaveholders out- 
side of South Carolina were not Secessionists. They called 
themselves Cooperationists. "Cooperate and compromise," 
was their platform.' 

October 12, 1832, Mississippi prohibited, after May i, 
1833, the importation of slaves to be sold as merchandise, 
and after January i, 1845, even actual settlers could no 
longer bring their slaves with them into the State. But the 
"unconditional and immediate emancipation" of the Aboh- 
tionist platform terrified them, and so "riled" the hotheads 
that Beauregard fired on the flag at Sumter before Jefferson 
Davis gave the word. I believe Mr. Davis did not want 
that shot fired. Recognized as one of the most capable 
mihtary men of the South, the httle Frenchman never 
afterwards was a favorite of the President of the Confed- 
erate States of America. The bombardment of Fort Sum- 
ter illustrates the folly of leaving to the discretion of a mere 
mihtary man the decision as to whether or not a nation 
shall be plunged into war. Since the war many a Southern 
man and woman, in the privacy of the home, has made 
this criticism of Jefferson Davis. At times he left too much 
discretion to subordinates, at others not enough. Over and 
over I have heard them say that that shot at Sumter was a 
mistake. Surely a whole people should not be punished 
for the mistakes of a few leaders. 

While I was a school girl at Cory don, fourteen years of 
age, I met a young law student, Walter Quintin Gresham. 
It was at a party. I was the "little girl in a red dress" 
chaperoned by two older sisters. Not yet twenty-one, tall, 
handsome, and always well dressed, his antecedents and his 

iSee page 141; also page 254. 



8 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

character came under the closest scrutiny of my family. 
He was the pupil of Judge WilHam A. Porter. After the 
fashion of many of the lawyers of that time, Judge Porter 
had his office in the same yard or enclosure within which 
stood the residence, a handsome brick dwelling. The law 
office in one corner of the lot was one story of two rooms 
with bookcases extending from the floor to the ceiling on 
all the walls, and filled to overflowing with text books and 
reports. It stood under a great elm tree with its front door 
opening into the street. 

Colonel William Gresham, the father of Walter Q. 
Gresham, was born in Mercer County, Kentucky, Septem- 
ber 17, 1802. He was the eldest son of George Gresham, 
who was born near Petersburg, Virginia, October 9, 1776. 
Lawrence Gresham, the father of George, was born in 
England. In 1759, when a small boy, Lawrence was sent 
to Virginia to live with his uncle — ^"indentured," it was 
called. After securing his "freedom" at his majority, 
Lawrence served for a time in the ranks of the Continental 
army. While yet a young man, George Gresham joined 
the stream of emigrants pouring into Kentucky. He 
"carried along" with him his father, Lawrence, then in fee- 
ble health, and his mother. In 1801, in Mercer County, Ken- 
tucky, George Gresham married Mary Pennington, the only 
sister of Dennis Pennington, who was foremost in shaping 
the constitutional and public policy of Indiana, and who 
was the first counselor and adviser of Walter Q. Gresham. 
And safe and sane ' ' Old Uncle Dennis " proved himself to be. 

In 1809 George Gresham moved his family, and entered 
land in Harrison County, Indiana, where the hamlet of 
Lanesville is now located. He gave ground for the churches 
and graveyards. In one of these cemeteries there are bur- 
ied Lawrence, George, and William Gresham, representing 
three generations, and representatives of several subsequent 
generations. 

The mother of Walter Q. Gresham, Sarah Davis, was 



BIRTH, ANCESTRY, AND EARLY YEARS 9 

born near Springfield, Washington County, Kentucky, Sep- 
tember 15, 1807. Her fattier, Jolin Davis, a native of 
Virginia, was of Scotch-Irish descent, and while yet a boy 
was brought by his father, Edward Davis, with the balance 
of the family, from Virginia to Mercer County, Kentucky. 
There were five hundred in the company including the 
slaves. John Davis married, in Mercer County, Kentucky, 
Sally Sitz, a woman of Welsh parentage. In 181 5 he moved 
to Harrison County, Indiana, taking with him the minor 
children of his large family of ten sons and six daughters. 
Of the sixteen, fourteen lived to be three score and ten and 
several past ninety, and all reared large families. Sarah,, 
one of the youngest, whose statements were the basis of 
many assertions in this volume, was but five months short 
of one hundred when she died. 

November 3, 1825, William Gresham married Sarah 
Davis. They went to live in a log cabin on land his father 
had entered, within a mile of the father's house. On this 
spot Sarah lived eighty-one years. 

William Gresham was elected by popular vote a colonel 
in the State militia, and in 1833, although a Whig, was 
almost unanimously elected sheriff of Harrison County. 
January 26, 1834, he was stabbed and instantly killed while 
aiding a constable to arrest a desperado named Levi Sipes. 

There survived William Gresham, his widow, Benjamin 
Q. A. Gresham, two daughters, Mary Andremead and Sadie, 
and two younger sons, Walter Quintin, born March 17, 1832, 
and William G., born July 30, 1833. 

Sarah Gresham had anti-slavery views as strong as any 
Abolitionist's. She told her boys stories of the evils of slavery. 
She often dwelt on the fact that she and her sister had 
told "Uncle Anthony" in Kentucky that it was a sin to sell 
Madge down the river from her baby. She took pride in 
the fact that her father moved to Indiana Territory because 
Kentucky was a Slave State, and she was fond of telling how, 
when a very young man, he refused as a gift from his father 



lo LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

a strong young negro to help him in his fanning. She was 
wont to say, "Slavery is a sin." But she could and did 
"separate the sinner from the sin," for she was tolerant, and 
instead of envying the Southern women their negroes, she 
pitied them. With but a few years' schooling in Kentucky 
and Indiana Territory, and none of the advantages of travel, 
she had a facility, directness, and force in expressing her 
views seldom excelled. And what is difficult for most 
women, she could listen until it was her turn to talk. 

In one respect only'did the boys give the mother anxiety. 
It was right for them to go out to battle for the Union, — or, 
as she saw it, to free the slaves — but she interdicted their 
going to the Ohio River to swim. In this she could not con- 
trol them. It was four miles to the river, through rugged, 
hilly country called "The Knobs," but as elevating to the 
imagination as the mountains of Switzerland. The boys 
grew rapidly, and were large and powerful for their ages. 
Each had a horse, a hunting dog, and a gun, and early 
developed into good marksmen. They were favorites and 
natural leaders. At sixteen Ben was stronger than any man 
in the entire neighborhood, and possessed physical and 
moral courage of the highest order. As the two younger 
boys developed, they were only behind Ben, of all the men 
in the neighborhood, in physical prowess. 

As the Gresham boys grew up, they conducted the farm 
and went to school in a log schoolhouse that stood in the 
Gresham woods. Walter was the student of the three, and 
was the image of his father. He studied botany in the 
fields. He knew every tree, flower, and shrub, and spear of 
grass, their seeds, and how they germinated. He studied the 
birds and animals. When fifteen years of age, happy in the 
possession of his first pair of boots, Walter went to church. 
The church services were held in the evening in a log school- 
house. During the service a heavy rain fell, swelling a small 
creek they had to cross to get home, almost beyond fording. 
The minister, being a small man, hesitated when they came 



BIRTH, ANCESTRY, AND EARLY YEARS ii 

to the stream, remarking, "I fear to try to cross." Young 
Gresham told him if he would get on his back he would carry 
him across. The minister did so, reaching the other side in 
safety. Some one asked the boy if he did not feel afraid to 
undertake it. "No," he said, "why should I, when I had 
the man of God on my back?" 

Dennis Pennington, "Old Uncle Dennis," was appointed 
by the Circuit Court of Harrison County, administrator 
of Colonel Gresham's estate, and by the Governor, sheriff 
of Harrison County, to fill out the unexpired term. He 
was approaching sixty at the time he became a candidate 
to succeed himself, and his opponent, a young man, made a 
speech at a gathering in which he said that Pennington, 
although a worthy man, was incapacitated, by reason of the 
infirmities of age, longer to serve the people. In his reply 
"Uncle Dennis" said he would challenge his opponent to 
a wrestling bout, and if he could not speedily demonstrate 
his superiority he would retire from the contest and urge 
all of his friends to vote for the younger man. The chal- 
lenge was declined, and Dennis Pennington was triumph- 
antly elected to the only lucrative office he ever held, unless 
it be taking the census of Indiana Territory in 1815 or the 
census of Harrison County, Indiana, in 1850. 

A Whig in politics, Dennis Pennington never hesitated 
to oppose the principles and traditions of his party. As a 
candidate for lieutenant-governor of Indiana, he opposed 
internal improvements and especially the construction of 
the Wabash and Erie Canal. He argued that the con- 
struction of the railroads, which would soon come, for they 
were a success in the East, would destroy the utility of the 
canal and entail a loss of all the money expended on its 
construction. Limited in education, phonetic in his style 
of spelling, Dennis Pennington was impassioned at tirnes, 
and almost always, where many educated and talented men 
fail, effective as a public speaker. But the people of the 
northern and central parts of the State went almost solidly 



12 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

against him and he was defeated. And although much of 
the water of the Wabash River, it is said, was used in the 
construction of the Wabash Railroad, its operation soon 
verified Dennis Pennington's prediction. 

"Old Uncle Dennis" was generous with the widow and 
the young children in the division of the fees which 
had accrued at the time of Colonel William Gresham's 
assassination. Samuel J. Wright, for convenience of ad- 
ministration, was appointed guardian of the five Gresham 
children. But it was only a nominal guardianship. The 
mother and "Uncle Dennis" looked after them. 

The mother married Noah Rumley. From this mar- 
riage, there were three children. Anthony — named after 
Anthony Davis — died in infancy. Mandy and Kate lived 
to mature womanhood, Kate to three score and ten. For 
their younger half-sisters, the boys always manifested the 
greatest solicitude, while the girls in turn thought their 
big brothers were invincible. They saw them followed by 
droves of boys, who made the Gresham homestead their 
headquarters. During a visit to a neighbor in the southern 
part of the county in the midst of the war, Kate heard a 
great deal of the Knights of the Golden Circle, and how 
they were going to subvert the government. While the 
meetings were held at night, they were not secret, and were 
attended by men from Kentucky. One morning at break- 
fast, after an all-night session, Kate said to the head of the 
family, ' ' Ben and Wat and Bill will soon be home from the 
army and you had better be careful about your meetings." 
After that the meetings of the Knights were in secret. 

The views of the mother, supplemented by the stories 
of "Old Uncle Dennis" and the sermons of Dennis's brother, 
the Reverend Walter Pennington, an itinerant Methodist 
preacher, made the Gresham boys anti-slavery as they lisped 
their alphabet. It was partly for Walter Pennington that 
Walter Quintin Gresham was named. 

Because of his relations with Walter Q. Gresham, and 



BIRTH, ANCESTRY, AND EARLY YEARS 13 

because he was one of the foremost men, if not the fore- 
most man from a practical standpoint, in the formative 
days in Indiana, Dennis Pennington and his family deserve 
more than passing mention. He was born in Cumberland 
County, Virginia, May 18, 1776, the fourth son of Edward 
Pennington, who reared six children, five sons and one 
daughter, Mary, who married George Gresham. 

In the Fall of 1797 Dennis Pennington rode with Henry 
Clay much of the way from Virginia to Kentucky. He 
seconded Henry Clay in the latter 's efforts in 1799 to make 
Kentucky a Free State — she had come in in 1792 as a Slave 
State — and then went prospecting on the north side of 
the Ohio River in the Northwest Territory. Meanwhile 
he farmed, taught school, and married. At Louisville he 
crossed the Ohio to Clarksville, laid out in 1784 on part of 
"Clark's Grant" of 150,000 acres of land given by the 
State of Virginia to General George Rogers Clark and his 
troops for capturing Kaskaskia and Vincennes. 

On his way to the legislature, to conventions, to the 
river, or just to see the boys, "Old Uncle Dennis" would 
stop over night at the Gresham homestead. His visits 
so excited her boys, the mother said, that she sometimes 
dreaded his coming. "Wat would ask questions until mid- 
night, tumble and toss the balance of the night, and then 
pester the life out of us for books about France, Spain, 
George Rogers Clark, and the Northwest Territory." 

It was from Dennis Pennington that the Gresham boys 
first heard the story of how Clark, with a few Virginia 
troops and frontiersmen, took Kaskaskia and Vincennes, 
and added to the Union all the territory northwest of the 
Ohio River. At both these places he found slaves, who 
had been introduced in 1700, and it was his assurance to 
the French that Virginia, a Slave State, would allow them 
"to retain their possessions and to enjoy their ancient 
rights and liberties," that caused them to side with him 
and make his conquest of the British garrison at Vincennes 
2 



14 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

possible. "Early was the seed of strife sown," said "Old 
Uncle Dennis," and Walter Q. Gresham never forgot this 
in all his contact with the pro-slavery men. 

Uncle Dennis told the boys of his many visits to General 
Clark; how he often found him in his log home, looking 
out on the Falls of the Ohio and berating the injustice of 
his native State and of the National government. Long 
before General Clark took to strong drink, lands granted 
to him by Virginia had been sold on execution on judgments 
that had been taken against him on bills he had drawn on 
Virginia in pa^^ment of supplies for troops who, under his 
leadership, were carrying her flag to victory and glory. 
Not until the time of, and due to the efforts of Senator 
Daniel W. Voorhees, did the United States pay the estate 
of George Rogers Clark the obligations it assumed when 
it "took over from Virginia the Northwest Territory." 
The old man also told the Gresham boys how, in his bitter- 
ness and resentment to his native land, General Clark 
accepted a commission as major-general through Citizen 
Genet of the French Republic, but for the sole purpose, as 
Dennis Pennington always contended, "of driving the 
Spanish from the Mississippi Valley." Their American 
history the Gresham boys learned as they learned their 
letters, and as well. 

Clarksville, now almost deserted, was at the time of 
Dennis Pennington's first visit a pretentious village. Lo- 
cated at the foot of "the Falls," General Clark expected it 
to become a great city, but when the steamboats came it 
was no place for them at low water, and at high water the 
swift current and ' ' big eddy ' ' made it a dangerous place for 
boats to land. The ' ' Buffalo Trail, ' ' which became the Vin- 
cennes Road from the Falls, ended at Clarksville, for there 
the buffalo crossed the Ohio River in their migrations from 
the Illinois or prairie country to Kentucky. 

It was out the Buffalo Trail, or the Vincennes Road, 
turning to the south at the head of "the Knobs," that the 



BIRTH, ANCESTRY, AND EARLY YEARS 15 

Harbisons, Penningtons, Rumleys, Davises, and Greshams 
went into the country lying between the Vincennes Road 
and the Ohio River. And thus it was that the first settle- 
ment in Harrison County, south of the Vincennes Road and 
before the settlement at Corydon, was at Lanesville, nine 
miles southwest of New Albany, as the crow flies. 

It was near Lanesville that William Pennington, Dennis's 
brother, settled, lived, and died. According to the local 
historian, elder members of the Pennington family were in 
advance of Dennis in Indiana, and settled in Lanesville in 
1792. But according to the traditions in the Gresham 
family, the Penningtons were not the first settlers in and 
about Lanesville. The mother of Walter Q. Gresham is my 
authority for the statement that Major John Harbison pre- 
ceded them all. 

Major Harbison was a native of Pennsylvania. One 
of the traditions is that he was a Revolutionary soldier, 
but more likely he got his title as an Indian fighter. He 
moved to Kentucky, and there is no doubt he was as des- 
perate an Indian fighter and daring an explorer in the 
Northwest Territory as Boone was in Kentucky. As a man 
of affairs and as a legislator he was Boone's superior. That 
he was in Indiana and camped in and about Lanesville as 
early as 1 792 is possibly true. He may have been there even 
earlier, for he crossed from Kentucky and Tennessee to the 
lake region many times, at periods when it was more danger- 
ous to traverse that region than to go through Kentucky. 

During the period between the treaty of peace with Great 
Britain in 1783 and Jay's treaty in 1794, the treaty of Green- 
ville in 1795, and the supplementary^ treaties with the 
Indians when the latter finally acknowledged the supremacy 
of the "Thirteen Fires," the thirteen original States, Major 
John Harbison was typical of the men who persisted in bor- 
ing into the Northwest Territory in defiance of the British 
soldiers still at Detroit and near Fort Wayne, of the Indians, 
of the congress under the confederation, of Washington 



i6 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

himself, and of the government under the Constitution. 
Claiming the country by conquest because the ally of the 
Indians had surrendered at Yorktown, the hardy backwoods- 
man was as merciless as Walter Q. Gresham thought the 
government of the United States became to the aborigines. 

But when Major Harbison first visited the Lanesville 
neighborhood, he was not then seeking a place to settle; he 
was searching for Mrs. English's children, who had been 
stolen by the Indians. Dr. English was killed by the Cher- 
okee Indians at Bean's Station, Tennessee. Among the 
children carried into captivity were Mrs. English's two 
daughters, Elizabeth and Virginia, and a son, Matthew. 

' ' Get me my children and I will marry you, ' ' is the way 
the widow answered Major Harbison's proposal. He first 
stole Virginia awa}'" from the Indians and then effected 
Matthew's exchange. Elizabeth, who was four years old 
when she was captured, had lost all knowledge of her own 
tongue at thirteen when she was recaptured — by "strat- 
agem." Matthew, her brother, when the Major's party 
located her near Detroit, returned to the wigwams, saying 
he was disgusted with the whites and would never again 
leave the Indians. After a few days the Indians' suspicions 
were allayed, and Elizabeth was allowed to go to a distant 
spring. There she was prevailed on — almost compelled — 
by her brother and Major Harbison to start with them at 
once for Kentucky. After a few years she regained her 
own language, and in Marion County, Kentucky, married 
Dennis Pennington. 

Virginia English, always called "Jinnie," married Wil- 
liam, or "Billy" Pennington, in 1804. It was one of the 
first marriages in Indiana Territory, and the first in what is 
now Harrison County. This is a matter of record. They 
always lived near Lanesville, within a mile of where Walter 
Q. Gresham was born. Jinnie had a mind of her own. One 
day, after she and Billy had been married fifty years, with 
children and grandchildren scattered over several counties, 



BIRTH, ANCESTRY, AND EARLY YEARS 17 

Billy came home in great trepidation. "Jinnie," said he, 
' ' we must hitch up at once and go to Cory don and get mar- 
ried over again. The preacher who married us has been 
indicted for horse stealing, and the conference has met and 
taken away his license, thus rendering null and void all his 
acts. We must get married over again at once, I tell you," 
Billy concluded. Jinnie argued that a marriage that had 
been contracted in good faith and lived up to for fifty years 
could not be affected, no matter what might have happened 
to the preacher who tied the knot. Billy was insistent, and 
the discussion became warm. Finally Jinnie closed the 
debate: "Well, when Jinnie marries again it will not be to 
Billy Pennington." 

Splendidly endowed by nature. Aunt Jennie was a fre- 
quent and always welcome guest at the Gresham homestead. 
Sometimes her visit would run into days. "Aunt Betsy," 
as Elizabeth Pennington was called, was not behind her 
sister in natural gifts, to which was added all the finesse and 
cunning of her childhood's captors. And when it came to 
Indian stories, Aunt Jennie did not have to draw on her imag- 
ination. She had all the tribes and the chiefs at her fingers' 
ends. She could tell about Harmar's and St. Clair's defeats, 
and of "Mad Anthony" Wayne's victory, and of scores of 
Indian fights not mentioned in any of the local histories. 

Elizabeth and Virginia English Pennington were sup- 
posed to be distant connections of William H. English, the 
Democratic candidate for Vice-President in 1880, and a 
leading man in southern Indiana in antebellum days. 

Major John Harbison died of cancer on May i, 1829, and 
was buried in a cornfield a few rods back of his home and 
about half a mile west of Lanesville, on the south side of the 
present New Albany and Corydon Pike and within a mile 
of where Walter Q. Gresham was born. For years the 
children were frightened by stories about his ghost and 
the ghosts of the Indians he had slain appearing just after 
nightfall. Here it was he built his first log cabin. It was 



i8 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

years before he entered the land, for it was not until after 
the final treaties with the Indians in 1804 that the land 
offices were opened up. No stone marks his grave, although 
for that time he was a man of means and owned much 
realty. In 18 18 it is recorded he sold one tract for $2,000 
cash. His will, which was probated May 4, 1829, and re- 
corded in Will Record "A, " at page 154, discloses that while 
he acted with Dennis Pennington in politics as an anti- 
slavery man, he did not free all his slaves.^ The appraise- 
ment of his personal property is interesting as disclosing 
the values of that time. One bay mare and colt were valued 
at $30; one speckled cow and calf, at $7; one long-horned 
cow and calf, at $10; while a white-backed heifer was con- 
sidered to be worth $3 . Seventeen head of young hogs 
were valued at $12; one clock, $30, and one secretary, $20. 

A grandson of Major Harbison, James Harbison, was a 
schoolmate of Walter Q. Gresham. During the Civil War 
Jim belonged to the Knights of the Golden Circle, but was 
one of the Knights who voted for Gresham for Congress in 
1866 as against his own party candidate, Michael C. Kerr. 

Elvira Boone was the first white child born in southern 
Indiana outside of Clark's Grant. She was born at Lacon- 
ia, Boone Township, Harrison County, in 1804. Elvira's 
father, George Boone, was a cousin of Daniel Boone. 
George Boone and Squire Boone, a brother of Daniel Boone, 
were among the early settlers in what is now Boone Town- 
ship, Harrison County. They were friends and fellow 
explorers with Dennis Pennington, but, unlike him, they 
were pro-slavery men.- As woodsmen, the Boones were 

1 "I give and bequeath to my beloved sister, Ann Porter Shaw, late Ann Porter Harbison, 
a certain negro woman (now in her possession) by the name (I think of Fannie), which negro 
woman was given to me by my mother to have and to hold, the said negro woman, together 
with her issue during my said sister's natural life and at her death to descend to the heirs of 
her body to have and to hold the same forever." (Mrs. Shaw then lived in Lexington, Ky.) 

2 In Miscellaneous Record "A" of the Records of Harrison County, at page 42, under 
date of May 12, 1812, Isaiah Boone of Boone Township, Harrison County, Territory of Indiana, 
by deed, "for a good and valuable consideration," emancipated his slave Amy, twenty-one 
years of age. Immediately following is an indenture which Amy signed by her "X" mark, 
in which, in consideration of clothing and sustenance. Amy bound herself to serve and obey 
Isaiah Boone and his heirs and assigns for a period of seventy-five years. 



BIRTH, ANCESTRY, AND EARLY YEARS 19 

Dennis's superiors, but when it came to politics, Dennis 
Pennington, supported as he was by his stepfather-in-law. 
Major John Harbison, excelled them, as he did the other 
pro-slavery men. After Indiana became a Free State some 
of the Boones returned to Kentucky. One, Hiram, became 
one of the large slaveholders in Meade County, and after 
the Civil War moved to Texas. 

It was in the Summer of 1801, or 1804, most likely the 
latter year, that Dennis Pennington and his party of ex- 
plorers selected the forks of Indian Creeks, now the town of 
Cory don, as the site of his future habitation. There were 
schools of fish in the streams, and game abounded. They 
made a small clearing, planted some turnip seed, and went 
back to Kentucky for the women, children, and household 
effects. When they returned six weeks later, they were 
surprised to find the deer" had not disturbed the turnips, 
which had fully matured. Within the present boundaries 
of Cory don, Dennis made his camp and built his log cabin 
near the spring, in part shaded by the great Constitutional 
Elm, so called because some of the sessions of the conven- 
tion that adopted Indiana's first constitution were held 
under its expanding arms. 

In 181 5 Dennis Pennington moved to a point four 
miles northwest of Cory don on the Vincennes Road — "the 
Barrens" it was called, because of the absence of tim- 
ber. His brother, Walter, soon joined him there. Here 
they built a log Methodist meeting-house — Pennington's 
Chapel. In the old churchyard sleep Dennis and Walter 
and many of the younger generations of the Penningtons. 

Before selecting the Corydon site, Dennis Pennington 
made a number of trips through the Indiana wilderness. 
On one he followed the Buffalo Trail from Clarksville to 
Vincennes, where he first met William H. Harrison, who, 
on January 10, 1801, assumed the reins of the Indiana terri- 
torial government, which had been organized March 3, 1800. 
He had previously visited Cincinnati and Chillicothe, the 



20 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

latter the capital of the Northwest Territory. At Chillicothe 
he conferred with General St. Clair, the Governor of the 
Northwest Territory, and also with Thomas Worthington, a 
Virginian who had freed his slaves, about fifty in number, 
and moved with them in 1797 to Ross County, Northwest 
Territory, settling near Chillicothe. The anti-slavery people 
in that part of the Northwest Territory — soon to become 
the State of Ohio — had succeeded in being cut off from 
their pro-slavery fellows in what is now Indiana and Illinois. 

Never for self or pelf, and one of the best practical 
politicians of his or any other time, Dennis Pennington 
decided to go into the contest in Indiana. As a matter 
of policy he supported Governor Harrison and Attorney- 
General Randolph, a pro-slavery Virginian, in their official 
aspirations. 

December 28, 1802, Governor Harrison, as president of a 
convention that he had been instrumental in assembling in 
Vincennes, memorialized Congress to suspend for ten years 
the Sixth Article of the compact between the United States 
and the people of the Northwest Territory, "that there shall 
he neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in said territory, 
because it had prevented the country from populating 
and had been the reason of driving many valuable citizens 
possessing slaves to the Spanish side of the Mississippi." 

It was from the lips of that old Virginian, Dennis Pen- 
nington, that Walter Q. Gresham first learned that it was 
John Randolph of Roanoke, the chairman of the committee 
of the House to which this memorial was referred, who on 
March 3, 1803, wTote the report against it. 

Then, on September 22, 1803, Governor Harrison and 
Judges Vanderburgh and Davis provided for the introduc- 
tion of slavery under the indenture system and made these 
indentures assignable. These laws were mainly copied from 
the Virginia and Kentucky codes. Under the ordinance 
of July 13, 1787, until the legislative period arrived, the 
governor and judges were the legislative body. Indentures 



BIRTH, ANCESTRY, AND EARLY YEARS 21 

drafted under these laws were for forty, fifty, and ninety 
years. Judge Vanderburgh was a slaveholder and he held 
slaves until his death at Vincennes in 1S17. 

Indiana Territory having attained a population of 5,000, 
the requisite number under the ordinance of July 13, 1787, 
to entitle it to a legislature, its first General Assembly was 
elected, met at Vincennes July 2, 1S05, and confirmed the 
governor's and judges' indenture law. Under the ordi- 
nance, while the lower house of the legislature was elected 
by the people, the upper house, or the "council," as it was 
called in the ordinance, composed of five members to 
serve for five years, was selected by the president from ten 
names nominated to him by the members of the House. 
Instead of selecting the five men, President Jefferson dele- 
gated this authority to Governor Harrison by inclosing 
to the governor commissions signed in blank. Governor 
Harrison filled in the blanks with pro-slavery men. And 
thus it was that the vSecond General Assembly of the Indiana 
Territory, on September 17, 1807, without the pretext of the 
indenture laws, provided for the introduction of slavery 
into the territory. Herein lay the cause of the Reverend 
Walter Pennington's bitter assailment of Thomas Jefferson. 

These laws, retained by the Illinois territorial legislature 
and vaHdated by the IlHnois Constitution of 18 18, became 
infamous in history as "The Ilhnois Black Laws." In 
them Abraham Lincoln could not even make a dent. The 
Illinois Supreme Court was rendering decisions on the ques- 
tion of slaves and the Black Laws until 1865.1 And not 
until the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment to the 
Constitution of the United States were they finally got rid of. 

October 10, 1807, Dennis Pennington was one of the 
speakers at the famous mass meeting at Springville, Clark 

' Cornelius j',s. Cohen i Breeze 131, 1825. I Sarah 115. Borden 4 Scammon 341, 1843. 
Nance vs. Howard i Breeze 242, 1828. Thornton Case 11 111. 332, 1849. 

Phcebe vs. Jay i Breeze 268, Homes vs. Ammons 14 111. 29, 1852. 

Bailey M. Cromwell 3 Scammon 71, 1840. Rodney vs. 111. Cent. 

Kinney vs. Cook 3 Scammon 232, 1840. ' R. R. Co. 19 111. 42, 1857. 



22 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

County, Indiana, at which the doctrine of "Squatter sover- 
eignty," or "Leave it to the people," was first advanced. 
Springfield was the first county seat of Clark County. Not 
a vestige of it remains to-day. 

After reciting the history of the slavery question, the 
Resolutions proceeded:^ 

As to the interest of the Territory, a variety of opinions 
exist ; but suffice your memorialists to state, that it is a fact that 
a great number of citizens in various parts of the United States 
are "preparing to and many of them have actually emigrated to 
this territory to get free from a Government which tolerates slavery. 
The institution of slavery is either right or wrong, and if Congress 
should think with us, that it is wrong, that it is inconsistent with 
the principles on which our future constitution is to be formed, 
your memorialists will rest satisfied that at least this subject will 
not be by them taken up until the constitutional number of the 
citizens of the Territory shall assume that right. 

Congress concluded to leave it to the people. As to who 
actually drew this Springville memorial, the record is silent, 
but as to who wrote its principles into the statute and con- 
stitution of Indiana, there is no ground for speculation. 
"Let Governor Harrison be reappointed and let Jonathan 
Jennings go to Congress; what we want is the legislature," 
said Dennis Pennington. 

February 27, 1809, Congress amended the ordinance 
of July 13, 1787, providing that the councillors, or upper 
branch of the legislature, should be elected by the people, 
and authorizing the governor to apportion the territory for 
this purpose. In the apportionment a councillor and a 
member of the House were given by Governor Harrison to 
Harrison County, which on April 11, 1808, had been organ- 
ized out of Clark and Knox counties. 

At the election, April 2, 1810, Major John Harbison, 
Dennis Pennington's stepfather-in-law, was elected coun- 
cillor from Harrison County, while Dennis Pennington him- 
self was elected from that county to the House, where the 

ISee pages 58 and 112. 



BIRTH, ANCESTRY, AND EARLY YEARS 23 

anti-slavery men were in an overwhelming majority. When 
they assembled, over anti-slavery men like John Paul and 
Richard Rue, soldiers of George Rogers Clark and General 
William Johnson, Dennis Pennington was elected Speaker of 
the House, and continued to be re-elected to that position 
at each succeeding session of the territorial legislature. 

At the first session in 18 10, not only did Dennis Penning- 
ton lead in repealing the legislation we have mentioned, but 
he took the affirmative and helped pass the acts prohibiting 
the introduction of indentured negroes into the territory, 
the act against the unlawful removal of negroes from the 
territory, and the act against kidnapping. The kidnapping 
of a favorite, and there were such cases, aroused the greatest 
resentment among the anti-slavery people. 

Repressive laws against emancipation and attachment 
for certain of their slaves, especially those who had been 
domestic servants, brought many negroes or mulattoes to 
the Northwest Territory. The few slaves the Penningtons 
owned they freed before they left Virginia. But "Aunt 
Fannie" did not want to be left behind, so she was carried 
along to Pennington's Chapel. She lived for years in Wal- 
ter Pennington's family and died one of the free negroes 
of Cory don. 

It was the rough and uncouth Dennis Pennington who 
drove Governor Posey out of Corydon, not the chills and 
malaria, for there was just as much of the latter in early days 
on Silver Creek, at Clarksville, and on Beargrass, at Louis- 
ville, as on Indian Creek, at Corydon. A Virginian by birth, 
rising to be a colonel in the Continental army. General 
Posey had been a member of the Kentucky legislature and a 
senator from Louisiana before President Madison appointed 
him Governor of Indiana. Succeeding Governor Harrison, 
the head of the pro-slavery party. Governor Posey at sixty- 
three, in feeble health and never much of a politician, was 
no match for Dennis Pennington, then in his prime, with the 
territorial legislature in the hollow of his hand. 



24 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

As the census enumerator in 1815, Dennis Pennington 
carried the anti-slavery propaganda into every household. 
And as a means of stirring up the people to elect the right 
kind of delegates to the convention that had been author- 
ized to submit a State constitution, Dennis Pennington 
objected to Governor Posey to the return of negroes and 
mulattoes claimed as fugitives — and there were such — 
without what is now called "due process of law," or con- 
trary to his act against kidnapping and the fugitive slave 
law that President Washington had signed. June 10, 18 16, 
that convention, with Dennis Pennington one of its mem- 
bers, met and wrote a clean-cut anti-slavery clause in the 
constitution for the State of Indiana. 

The efficiency of Dennis Pennington's system is attested 
by the fact that during the decade from 1810 to 1820, the 
number of free negroes in Indiana increased from less than 
400 to over 1,200, while in Illinois they decreased from 
600 to 450. During the same period, the number of slaves 
in Illinois, under the "Black Laws," increased from 168 
to 917. In Indiana, in 1800, there were but 28 slaves; in 
1810, 237, due entirely to the governor's and judges' laws. 
The territorial legislation of 18 10 arrested their increase, 
and in 1820 the Indiana Supreme Court, ^ at one sitting, in 
construing the anti-slavery clause of the Indiana constitu- 
tion freed all slaves then in the State except the few who 
were held as slaves prior to the ordinance of June 13, 1787. 
In keeping faith with the French at Kaskaskia and Vin- 
cennes. Governor St. Clair with Washington's approval had 
held that the ordinance did not free any persons who were 
slaves on and prior to the date of its enactment. 

Dennis Pennington also helped to abate the pro-slavery 
movement to Missouri via Clarksville and the Vincennes 
Road. If the negro slave, while his master was on his way 
through Indiana, ran off, the master received no aid from the 
State in capturing the runaway. The Louisiana Supreme 

1 In re Clark, I Blackford 122. 



BIRTH, ANCESTRY, AND EARLY YEARS 25 

Court had declared that one breath of free air with the 
master's consent rendered the slave forever afterwards free. 
But in Illinois it was different.^ The "Black Laws" and 
"comity will protect the slaveholder" while passing through 
Illinois. Hence it was that the route via Shawneetown, 
Illinois, to Belleville and East St. Louis, and thence across 
the Mississippi, became the popular route for the Kentucky 
and Tennessee slaveholder migrating to Missouri. 

One day Dennis Pennington said, "Boys, the capital 
will have to leave Vincennes and come to one of the river 
counties. For us to get it at Corydon, we must have ready 
a fine county courthouse, suitable for the capitol, in which 
the Legislature and Supreme Court may meet, when we ask 
them to come." Accordingly, in 181 1, the Harrison County 
Courthouse was completed. It is still standing, a two-story 
building, sixty feet square, with walls of stone two feet 
thick. One of the few historic buildings in the Mississippi 
Valley, the State has taken steps to preserve it. 

February 12, 18 13, Dennis Pennington, as a member of 
the legislature from Harrison County, introduced the fol- 
lowing resolution: "Resolved, that the capital be removed 
from Vincennes, because it is dangerous to continue longer 
here on account of threatened depredations of the In- 
dians, who may destroy our valuable public records." It 
passed unanimously. Then the lobby talked about Harri- 
son County's fine courthouse. March 11, 18 13, Corydon, 
by the act of that day, was named the capital from and 
after May i, 1813. There it remained until 1824, when it 
was moved to Indianapolis. 

When the Mexican War came on, Ben Gresham was 
nineteen. He and Edward L. Pennington, of the second 
generation of Penningtons, immediately enlisted in the 
Second Indiana Volunteers. Pennington was elected second 
lieutenant, and Ben, over many men twice his years, first 
sergeant of Company "I" of that regiment. Its colonel, 

1 Williard vs. People, 4 Scammon 461, decided in 1844. 



26 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

William Bowles, was a friend of Jefferson Davis, and after- 
wards, as a member of the Knights of the Golden Circle, 
in southern Indiana, received a commission from the Presi- 
dent of the Confederate States of America. This regiment 
was afterwards called the "Running Regiment." But Ben 
always claimed that the running retreat at Buena Vista 
was due to express orders which he heard Colonel Bowles 
himself give. 

The return of Ben from the Mexican War enabled 
Walter, then seventeen years of age, to accept the place 
"Uncle Dennis" had arranged for him in the office of his 
guardian, Samuel J. Wright, auditor of Harrison County. 
The boy entered upon his work with a zest. His first task 
was as minute clerk to the board of county commissioners. 
His nights were devoted to study. When fall came, he re- 
tained his position, doing his w^ork at nights, and attended 
the Corydon Seminary, conducted by James G. May, a 
descendant of the North Carolina Quakers who settled 
Salem, Washington County, Indiana. In two years young 
Gresham completed the course of study in May's Academy. 
His acquaintance grew rapidly, and he soon was a general 
favorite with all classes in town. 

That service as amanuensis to the board of county 
commissioners was an admirable apprenticeship to the law. 
"Uncle Dennis " divined what was in his favorite. An order 
that the boy wrote — helped formulate — at the dictation 
of the three unlettered men, he. soon heard denounced on 
the streets of Corydon by Samuel Keen, an eminent lawyer, 
as the "ultimatum" of the board of county commission- 
ers. "They possess more power than the Legislature, the 
Governor, and the Supreme Court combined," declared 
the irate lawyer. One of the anomalies of our American 
system is that boards of county commissioners possess 
legislative, executive, and judicial powers of the highest 
order. 

William T. Otto, who lived in New Albany, but whose 



BIRTH, ANCESTRY, AND EARLY YEARS 27 

duties as Circuit Judge brought him to Corydon at stated 
intervals, took an interest in the young student and early 
directed his reading in the EngHsh classics. Judge Otto, 
a native of Philadelphia, where he studied law in the office 
of one of the Ingersolls, and afterwards became reporter of 
the Supreme Court of the United States and one of the 
best educated and accomplished lawyers of his time, united 
with "Old Uncle Dennis" in advising the boy to study law, 
and stimulated the youthful mind by legal stories. One 
that made an indelible impression was how Horace Binney, 
the best of all the Philadelphia lawyers, spent a year in 
London, England, searching the unpubhshed records, and 
reviving the memory of the old clerks who could tell of the 
saying of this or that chancellor, and then came back and 
defeated Daniel Webster, in the Girard will case. 

Meantime Walter Q. Gresham was transferred to the 
office of the clerk of the courts of Harrison County. When 
court was in session he entered the orders in the order book 
as they were made by the judge, and in vacation made up 
a complete record of the decided cases. In this way he 
acquired an insight into the practical workings of a lawsuit 
and learned much of the unwritten law precedents and 
gossip that is so valuable to the practicing lawyer and 
judge on the bench. 

The Winter of 1850 and 185 1 he again taught a term of 
school in the log schoolhouse on the Gresham farm. He 
had taught his first term before he turned sixteen. He 
was an exacting teacher, and more progress was made by 
pupils in that six months than in the same length of time 
before or since, according to the statements of some of those 
who were in attendance. School out, he returned in the 
spring to Corydon and worked in the office of the clerk of 
the county until the following September, when he entered 
the Indiana State University at Bloomington, where he 
remained but one year. 

In September of 1852 he took up the study of law in 



28 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

the office of Judge William A. Porter, who was a graduate 
of Miami University and had settled in Cory don in 1827. 
In his legal education, so far as it bore on the slavery ques- 
tion, he was fortunate, as will appear in the next chapter, 
in his technical legal preceptor, whose exposition of the 
underlying principles, with the concrete illustrations from 
actual life which "Old Uncle Dennis" furnished, were so 
luminous that it was a dehght to dig into the musty law 
books. Judge Porter, the typical old-style lawyer, tall, 
gaunt, cold, calculating, well-to-do, and conservative to the 
last degree, was a master of his profession. He had served 
as prosecuting attorney and probate judge, and for those 
days was a lawyer of wide practice and experience. He also 
had had much experience as a legislator, having served four 
terms in the Indiana legislature, during one session as 
speaker and two terms in the Upper House or Senate. In 
those da3'S there were few law schools. The one connected 
with the State University at Bloomington, in which Judge 
Otto was a professor, Walter Q. Gresham had not the 
means to attend. But he gained from Judge Otto as 
much as he would have derived as a member of his law 
school — more, perhaps. Judge Porter was a teacher as 
well as \aw}rer, who, according to the usages of those times, 
took the pains to instruct his pupil. The practical knowl- 
edge of forms and court procedure that Walter Q. Gresham 
had acquired dispensed with instructions on theories. It 
was with principles that the judge familiarized his pupil. 
And in the beginning of that course parts of Blackstone's 
and Kent's Commentaries, definitions and legal terms, were 
so well niemorized that they never were forgotten. Envi- 
roned as he was, Walter Q. Gresham gained a better hterary 
and legal education than nine-tenths of the modern college 
and law school graduates. 

In that little office under the great elm tree he spent his 
days and most of his evenings for almost two years. Mean- 
time he joined the Masons, mingled much with the people 



BIRTH, ANCESTRY, AND EARLY YEARS 29 

of the town, went to parties, and deprecated the activities 
of the Underground Railroad. 

April I, 1854, on the motion of Judge Porter, young 
Gresham was admitted to practice in the Circuit and Com- 
mon Pleas Court. Soon afterwards a partnership was 
formed with Thomas C. Slaughter, his senior b}^ fifteen 
years, under the firm name of Slaughter and Gresham. 
Mr. Slaughter was a man of much business and legal ability. 

The junior member brought to the firm an important 
piece of litigation. May 18, 1854, the partition suit of 
Stanley Young, Jr., against his brother Robert H. Young, 
his mother, and his other brother and sisters, was begun in 
the Harrison County Circuit Court. Stanley Young, Jr., 
had been a schoolmate of Mr. Gresham's at Corydon. 
There was a bond of sympathy between them in that each 
had lost his father at the hand of an assassin. 

Although not of age, Stanley Young had been named 
as one of the executors of his father's will. During the 
July term, 1850, of the Harrison County Circuit Court, 
Colonel William C. Marsh shot and killed St. Clair Young, 
Stanley's father, in a quarrel which grew out of a trivial 
affair. Marsh was indicted for murder, but after contin- 
uing the case from term to term, his lawyer, Samuel Keen, 
in September, 1853, when the State was not ready, forced 
it to trial, and secured a verdict of "Not guilty." Judge 
Otto was on the bench. Both Marsh and Young had large 
farms on the Ohio River and were men of wealth for those 
days. St. Clair Young left a large amount of personal 
property and much real estate in Harrison County, also 
property in Meade and Hardin counties, Kentucky. In 
the will, which was written in his own hand. Young recited 
that one of his sons-in-law, John Timberlake, had received 
more than his wife's share of the estate, which should be 
considered as an advancement in adjusting the interests 
of the other children, and that as he disliked him, his son- 
in-law Timberlake should account to the estate for all over 



30 LIFE OF WALTER QtJlNTlN GRESHAM 

and above what Mrs. Timberlake would take as an heir. 
By another provision a trust was created for the benefit of 
Mrs. Timberlake and her minor children. But in the event 
that she should marry again, it was provided she should 
lose certain provisions that were peculiarly favorable to her. 
She promptly renounced the will and took what the law 
allowed in such cases. It was a complicated lawsuit from 
the beginning, and was not finally settled until August, 
1 86 1. Stanley Young was a delicate, silent young man, 
but a thorough gentleman. Unlike Mr. Gresham, he cher- 
ished a resentment against the slayer of his father. At 
first it was expected, or rather feared, that some day he 
might resort to violence. As the years passed and nothing 
happened, it was supposed that he had forgotten his malice, 
when, suddenly, in 1858, during a term of court at Branden- 
burg, he shot Colonel Marsh dead without warning, and at 
the risk of killing his friend and attorney, Mr. Gresham. 

As a lawyer, Walter Q. Gresham was a success from the 
start. He developed at once into a good advocate, without 
the florid style of oratory then so common. He possessed 
invective and could be impassioned, but in the main he 
addressed himself to the reason of his hearers, whether on 
the bench, on the jury, or at the hustings. He studied the 
reports of the EngHsh common law and chancery courts, 
and especially the decisions of Chief Justice Marshall and 
Chancellor Kent, and attempted to acquire their exactness 
of language and clearness of statement. Simplicity coupled 
with clearness is the most powerful weapon in debate. He 
early realized the flexibility of the equity principles of 
Chancellor Kent, in seeking fraud and deceit, and was able 
to apply them at the bar and subsequently on the bench. 
The moral side never escaped him. The expression, "sound 
in morals as in law," afterward used from the bench, some- 
times brought criticism on him, from lawyers, litigants, and 
interests whose schemes to defraud he would "cut across 
lots" to circumvent. 



BIRTH, ANCESTRY, AND EARLY YEARS 31 

One of his contemporaries, a Virginian by birth, Judge 
W. N. Tracewell, himself a successful practitioner, told me 
that up to the time Walter Q. Gresham went on the bench 
he enjoyed the trial of a lawsuit more than any man he ever 
knew. As a young man, he had no fear of meeting the older 
members of the bar and was put up against them by his 
partner and his old preceptor. 

The practice of Slaughter and Gresham extended to a 
large part of the Second Congressional District, which was 
composed of the counties of Clark, Floyd, Harrison, Craw- 
ford, Perry, Scott, Orange, and Washington. The partners 
went regularly to all terms of court in Crawford, Orange, 
Washington, and Perry counties. Judge Slaughter was 
born in Corydon, but his parents were Kentuckians. The 
firm also had business in Meade, Hardin, Breckinridge, and 
Hancock counties, Kentucky, and, in turn, had much of 
the business of the Kentuckians who came to the Harrison 
County courts. In those days, there was great commerce 
on the Ohio River, and much admiralty business fell to the 
firm of Slaughter and Gresham. Mr. Slaughter was of a 
delicate constitution, and as he disliked traveling, the cir- 
cuit rounds of this work devolved on the younger man, and 
it was to his liking. His old preceptor, Judge Porter, em- 
ployed him to look after much of his business and to try or 
assist in the trial of all cases on the circuit. He followed 
the business of the firm to the Supreme Court of the State 
and in the Federal courts at Indianapolis. And as a young 
housekeeper, I know their practice was remunerative. 



CHAPTER II 
THE "UNDERGROUND RAILROAD" 



PERSONAL LIBERTY LAWS — THE SOMMERSET OR NEGRO 
case" — MAN STEALING ACT AND JOINT RESOLUTION — FUGI- 
TIVE SLAVE LAWS — PRIGG CASE — CALIFORNIA GOLD RUSH — 
WENDELL PHILLIPS HOLDS MASSACHUSETTS OUT OF THE 
UNION BUT WEBSTER ENFORCES THE NATIONAL LAW — 
WALTER Q. GRESHAM NO ABOLITIONIST. 

WALTER Q. GRESHAM was in politics before he was 
admitted to practice at the bar. 
From Louisville the Ohio River runs to the southwest, 
and then to the northwest, describing almost half a circle, 
only thirty miles across, but sixty-four miles around. In 
this big bend, carved out, as it seems, from the State of 
Kentucky, is the largest part of Harrison County, Indiana. 
Corydon, the county seat, farther south than Louisville, is 
fourteen miles from the river at almost all points. A road 
leads south from Corydon to Mauckport, the "seaport" 
of Harrison County, as it was facetiously called. The 
Mauckport Road was one of the first highways constructed 
in southern Indiana. Then two miles up the river bank it 
runs to the ferry crossing to Brandenburg, the county seat 
of Meade County, Kentucky. This large river frontage and 
other roads converging from the river into the Mauckport 
Road and into Corydon's principal north and south street, 
from which a road leads north to Salem, the county seat of 
Washington County, and crossing the New Albany and 
Paoli Pike, made the main street of Corydon the principal 
thoroughfare of the "Underground Railroad." Two and a 
half miles south of Corydon, on the Mauckport Road, "Bill" 
Crawford maintained the first "station " on the Underground 

32 



THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD 33 

Railroad, north of the river. His so-called farm, in the 
hills and hollows, was admirably adapted for concealing a 
fugitive. He would keep a negro a week if necessary, it 
was said; and he did not finally go out of business until 
after the Emancipation Proclamation. The next "station" 
north was at John Rankin's, fifteen miles north of Corydon, 
near Fredericksburg, on the New Albany and Paoli Pike. 
Thence different roads were taken north to the Cincinnati 
and St. Louis Railroad. 

From the earliest time, up that Mauckport Road came 
the kidnapper and the fugitive. The anti-slavery people 
always claimed the kidnapper was in the advance. 

While the great mass of the people of Corydon and 
Harrison County considered it disreputable and dishonora- 
ble to aid a fugitive slave, young men fond of hazard and 
adventure considered it great sport to aid a negro's flight 
from " Bill " Cra\A'ford's to John Rankin's. Public sentiment 
was with those men in Corydon who made it a practice to 
catch runaway negroes. The rewards ranged from $100 to 
$250, according to the value of the fugitive. Captures 
occurred right in the town. Sometimes the negroes were 
sent through the town late at night, unguarded, on foot. 
It was then they were caught. But under guard of the 
Corydon boys, the fugitives went through in safety. There 
were men in Harrison County who, in collusion with men in 
Kentucky, would encourage a negro to run away, that they 
might recapture him and then secure a reward. Names 
might be mentioned, but it is not necessary. 

Around Corydon, a mile and a half to the west of " Bill " 
Crawford's, but coming back to the Salem Road on the 
north, was another branch of the underground line. It 
was through "Cousin Zack" Pennington's farm. The way 
was pointed out by Pilot Knob, rising above the hills two 
miles west of Corydon, but discernible for miles. "Zack" 
Pennington, a son of "Uncle Dennis" Pennington, was, 
in 1848, a mature man with a growing family. He defied 



34 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

public sentiment and his father's advice and received the 
fugitives in his own home. With Zack's rifle and Zack's 
two boys, Dixon at first, and Matthew later on, at his heels 
to carry the game, Walter Q. Gresham scoured the woods 
west of Corydon and "always brought home plenty of 
squirrels for supper," said "Mat," in speaking of those early 
days. Dick at seventeen and Mat at fourteen were among 
the first Union volunteers. Mat had to run off, as many 
another boy, and lied about his age to get in. 

When Walter Q. Gresham first became minute clerk 
for the board of county commissioners, his legal guardian, 
Samuel J. Wright, the county auditor, was encouraging the 
boys on the ' ' Underground Railroad. ' ' But the boy did not 
lose his head. Headstrong as he was, afterwards criticised, 
it was merely the courage of his convictions; no man was 
more amenable to reason, deferential to the wise and hum- 
ble, or more often sought advice and information. Dennis 
Pennington was still dispensing justice as a justice of the 
peace. Mellowing with age the old man was one of the best 
informed of men on the workings of our dual form of govern- 
ment. Controversies that were beyond his jurisdiction as a 
justice were submitted to him as an arbitrator. The first 
official mention of Dennis Pennington is the record that, on 
July lo, 1807,1 Governor Harrison appointed him a justice 
of the peace in Clark County. As a territorial magistrate he 
possessed almost as much power as a Justice of the Supreme 
Court — he decided whether a man was free or slave. ^ He 

1 Dennis Pennington was in the Indiana state legislature as a senator at the sessions of 
1816, 1817, 1818, 1819; then he was out two years. He came back and served in the House 
during the sessions of 1822 and 1823. There was no session in 1824. Then he was in the 
Senate in 1825 and 1826. The session of 1827 he missed. The sessions of 1828 and 1829 
he was in the House. The sessions of 1830, 1831, and 1832 he was in the Senate. Then 
he was out until 1842, when he came back and was a member of the House in 1843, 1844, 
and 1845. 

Oliver H. Smith, afterwards a United States senator from Indiana, said: "I became 
acquainted with Dennis Pennington when we were members of the legislature at Corydon in 
1823. The journals of the state library are full of the acts in a representative capacity of 
Dennis Pennington. He was a warm personal and political friend of Henry Clay." 

2 Section 3 of the Act of February 12, 1793: " That when a person held to labor in any 
of the United States, or in either of the territories on the Northwest or South of the river Ohio, 
under the laws thereof, shall escape into any other of the said states or territories, the person 



THE "underground RAILROAD 35 

liked power and he knew how to wield it. In his judicial and 
legislative capacity he studied due process of law as written 
in the ordinance for the organization of the Northwest Ter- 
ritory, and the Sommerset case, that he might properly 
construe the fugitive slave clause of the National Constitu- 
tion and the fugitive slave law that President Washington 
signed. In his long legislative career, Dennis Pennington 
had accumulated a large library of session laws, revised 
statutes, and congressional records,^ and had an intimate 
knowledge of men and events that is not in the books. He 
had a pamphlet copy of the arguments of the lawyers and 
the decision of Lord Mansfield, June 22, 1772, in the case 
of James Sommerset vs. Charles Stewart, or "The Negro 
Case," before it got into the law reports. Many a night the 
school boy, apprentice to the law, and law student, spent at 
"Old Uncle" Dennis's home. In the evening, when there 
was no farmer going out with whom he might ride, he easily 
covered the four miles on foot, and rode in the next morning. 
"He milked me dry, ' ' the old man said, in telling of these visits. 
It was "Old Uncle Dennis" who first put Walter Q. 
Gresham to reading that second great declaration of human 
rights, the ordinance for the organization and government 
of the Northwest Territory, and pointed out that it embraced 
what the first did not, the poor degraded African, or "the 

to whom such labor or service may be due, his agent or attorney, is hereby empowered to 
seize or arrest such fugitive from labor, and take him or her before any Judge of the Circuit 
or District Courts of the United States residing or living within the state, or before any magis- 
trate of any county or city or town corporate, wherein such seizure or arrest shall be made. 
And upon proof satisfactory to such judge or magistrate, either by oral testimony or affidavit 
taken before and certified by a magistrate of any such state or territory, that the person so 
seized or arrested, doth, under the laws of the state or territory from which he or she fled, 
owe service or labor to the person claiming him or her, it shall be the duty of such judge or 
magistrate to give a certificate to such claimant, his agent or attorney, which shall be suffi- 
cient warrant for removing the said fugitive from labor to the state or territory from which 
he or she fled." 

Section 4 of the Judiciary Act of Sept. 24, 1789, which organized the Supreme. Circuit, 
and District Courts of the United States, made the Justices of the Supreme Court members 
of the Circuit Courts. 

1 January 19, 1846, at the adjournment of the thirteenth session of the Indiana legislature, 
the House adopted the following resolution: 

"Resolved unanimously: That the thanks of this House be tendered to the venerable 
gentleman from Harrison County, Dennis Pennington, for his kind and fatherly treatment 
of the members of the House individually during the present session and for his long and 
faithful service to the state during the whole period of its existence." 



36 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

nigger," ' as the old man called him. Walter Q. Gresham 
was with Uncle Dennis when he died in September, 1854, 
and he often remarked that he never forgot the clearness of 
vision, the fortitude and faith, the old Virginian exhibited 
to the last. 

Judge Porter, from whom, as has been noted, Mr. Gres- 
ham obtained his technical legal education, had kept up a 
most excellent brief on the subject of slavery which he had 
started in his legislative career. It commenced with the 
Sommerset or "The Negro Case," and Section 4 of Article 4 
of the Constitution of the United States. On its purely 
political side there was — 

(i) The pro-slaveny' side or Calhoun theory, with all 
constitutional provisions, legislation, and decisions to sup- 
port it; 

(2) The Abolitionist's view as developed by Wendell 
Phillips, the ablest lawyer, perhaps, of his time; 

(3) The Free Soil theory; 

(4) The statesman's side, that of Clay and Webster. 
According to the record, as the lawA^ers say, in 1769 

Charles Stewart, a Virginian, took one of his slaves, James 
Sommerset, to England. Lord Mansfield's antipathy was 
especially to Massachusetts and this may be the reason why 
the gossip was that Sommerset was a Massachusetts and not 
a Virginia slave. The case was elaborately argued and fully 
reported, first by printed pamphlet, then in 1774 in Lofts' 
Reports, and again in 18 14 under the title of "The Negro 
Case" (20 Howell State Trials i). It was not fair, the pro- 
slavery lawyer said, for the reporter, years after the decision, 
to publish an elaboration of Hargrave's argument that was 
not delivered in court, and besides, Mansfield was a partisan 
and not a fair judge. Be this as it may, it was the lawyer's 

1 Section 6 of the ordinance of July 13, 1787: "There shall be neither slavery nor invol- 
untary servitude in the said territory, otherwise than in the punishment of crimes, whereof 
the party shall have been duly convicted; provided always, that any person escaping into the 
same, from whom labor or service is lawfully claimed in any one of the original states, such 
fugitive may be lawfully reclaimed and conveyed to the person claiming his or her labor or 
service aforesaid." 



THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD" 37 

method of hitting at the British Empire and the Ameri- 
can RepubHc because they still recognized slavery. 

But even in the pamphlets and in Lofts' Reports there 
is practically every argument against slavery. There are 
there the natural, inherent, inalienable rights of man as 
first set forth by Montesquieu, Vattel, Locke, and the other 
philosophers. The history of slavery from antiquity and 
its abolition is traced. And it was shown by Blackstone 
how that species of slavery known as "white villenage" 
had long been abolished in England. There were the propo- 
sitions: "As soon as a man puts foot on English soil he 
is free," and "The same is the law of France. "^ 

This was the case: 

On December 3, 1771, affidavits were made by Thomas 
Wilkin, Elizabeth Cade, and John Marlow, that James 
Sommerset, a negro, was confined in irons on board a ship 
called the Mary Ann, John Knowles, commander, lying 
in the Thames, and bound for Jamaica. Lord Mansfield, 
the celebrated Chief Justice of the Court of Kings Bench, 
the highest common law court in the Kingdom, by a writ 
of habeas corpus, commanded Captain Knowles to produce 
the body of Sommerset, with the cause of his detention. 
December 0, Captain Knowles answered that he held Som- 
merset as the negro slave of Charles Stewart, a Virginian, 
who had delivered Sommerset into his custody to be carried 
to Jamaica and there sold as a slave. It further appeared 
that Sommerset had been apprehended in the wilds of Africa 
by slave dealers, carried to Virginia, and there sold to Stew- 
art, a planter. That having business in London, Stewart 
brought vSommerset along as his valet, but while in England, 
Sommerset ran away, was apprehended by force of arms, 
and put on board the Mary Ann. 

At first Lord Mansfield recommended an adjustment, as 
it was suggested on the record before him that there were at 
that time " 14,000 or 15,000 African runaways and valets and 
servants in England" who would be affected by his ruling. 

1 See pa^e 8i. 



38 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

As a matter of fact, it is doubtful if there ever were as 
many as 14,000 negroes in England. A settlement failing, 
the questions were referred to the full bench for argument. 
June 10, 1772, the argument ended. Again Lord Mans- 
field advised an adjustment — even suggested an appli- 
cation to Parliament — and in concluding his remarks 
said: "If the parties will have judgment, 'fiat justitia, mat 
cesium ' — ' Let justice be done, though the heavens should 
fall.' " 

June 22, 1772, his lordship delivered the opinion of the 
full bench. It was short and to the point, only three pages 
in length. It was the kind, Walter Q. Gresham said years 
afterwards, when on the bench himself, "that produces the 
conviction that the court at least believes what it says." 
His lordship concluded: "The state of slavery is of such a 
nature that it is incapable of being introduced on any 
reasons, moral or political, but only by positive law. . . . 
It is so odious that nothing can be suffered to support it 
but positive law. ... I cannot say this case is allowed 
or approved by the law of England, and therefore, the 
black must be discharged."^ 

Eleven years before Har grave's argument and Lord 
Mansfield's opinion, an American lawyer, James Otis, for 
the first time in a practical way brought to the attention of 
the colonial crown judges the natural, inherent, and inalien- 
able rights of man as set forth by the philosophers Vattel 
and Montesquieu. It was in a* lawsuit in February, 1761. 
"Then and there was the child Independence born." 

Thomas Jefferson was then a schoolboy eighteen years 
of age. A score of times I have heard Walter Q. Gresham 
mention James Otis where he mentioned Thomas Jefferson 
once. The popular, historical, and even judicial miscon- 
ception that Otis was simply declaiming against the writs 
of assistance was not Walter Q. Gresham's as a law student, 
and never afterwards. In the chapter in this book on the 
Whiskey Ring and the Counselman case, which involved 

iSee pages loo to 102. 



THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD 39 

the virility of the Interstate Commerce Act, it will appear 
that the Supreme Court of the United States did not at 
first comprehend the government which Otis conceived. 
It was the trade and navigation laws of 1661-1663 for 
the first titne attempted to be enforced in the colonies 
that Otis attacked as being in conflict with the natural 
rights of the Boston merchant. If the laws were valid, 
Otis did not dispute the right and duty of the colonial 
judges to issue the writs of assistance authorizing the 
customs officers to search warehouses and dwellings for 
smuggled goods. These principles of Vattel, Montesquieu, 
or Otis, as we may choose to call them, percolated to the 
common people. The "sincrs" of the Mecklenburg declara- 
tion of independence applied them before Thomas Jefferson 
did. Playing both ends — first setting forth the natural, 
inalienable right of men — one of the plaints of Jefferson 
against the British king was, "He has stirred up insurrec- 
tions among our slaves." Without that grievance, the 
American Revolution might have been a failure. To re- 
verse the Sommerset case the fugitive slave clause of the 
American Constitution was adopted. 

Long before our independence was assured, such is the 
effect of precedent in the administration of the law, American 
judges had taken notice of Mansfield's opinion. And then 
the legislatures and constitutional conventions took it up. 
March i, 1780, the colony of Pennsylvania by an act of their 
legislature abolished slavery, but out of consideration for 
the members of the Continental Congress, this legislation 
provided that during the sitting of the Congress — it was 
then in session at Philadelphia — its members might be 
attended by their slaves as servants. A few months later, 
Massachusetts, by a bill of rights in her constitution, soon to 
be followed by the other New England Colonies or States, 
without any qualification, adopted the rule that there could 
not be property in man. Under the Articles of Confed- 
eration, there was no provision for the return of fugitive 



40 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN (IRESHAM 

slaves. When the convention met in 1787, to provide for 
a national constitution, the most important question was 
that of fugitive slaves. 

It was to modify this rule of the Sommerset case in so 
far as it applied to fugitive slaves in order to make a more 
perfect Union, ^ that Section 4 of Article 4 was inserted in 
the Constitution of the United States, viz. : 

No person, held to service or labor in one state, under the 
laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any 
law or ree^ijla^-ion therein be discharged from such service or labor; 
but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such 
service or labor may be due. 

Soon the construction of this section was brought to 
Washington's attention as President. The Governor of 
Pennsylvania applied to the Governor of Virginia for the 
return of three Virginians who had come into Pennsylvania 
and kidnapped a negro, contrary to the provisions of the 
Pennsylvania act of March i, 1790, and carried him off to 
Virginia. The Governor of Virginia refused to surrender 
the Virginians, and thereupon the Governor of Pennsyl- 
vania applied to President Washington for redress. 

While Washington was a large slaveholder, and as some 
of his biographers say, resorted to strategy to get his house- 
hold servants back to Virginia when, in 1 790, the government 
was moved from New York,- where slavery still was lawful, 
to Philadelphia, and some of Attorney-General Randolph's 
slaves claimed their freedom under the Pennsylvania stat- 
utes, according to Dennis Pennington, Washington did not 
then adopt the construction that was at that time advanced 
and afterward obtained of the words ' ' shall be delivered up 
on claim," viz., that the master could walk into a crowd and 
lay his hands on a negro, claimed to be a runaway, and lead 
him or her home like a horse. 

1 Justice Story in Prigg vs. Pennsylvania, i6 Peters 539, decided in 1X4J. 

2 July 16, 1790, Congress by act ordered the seat of government transferred to Phila- 
delphia, there to remain until December i, 1800, then to the District of Columbia. 



THE "underground RAILROAD " 41 

The fugitive slave law that Attorney-General Randolph 
drew and Washington signed February 18, 1793, provided 
that the alleged runaway should have a fair trial in the 
county in the State where he was apprehended, or, to state 
it more nearly, it provided that the States and the State 
judicial officers as well as the national officers should en- 
force the national law, and not any man who could get his 
hands on the negro without a breach of the peace. And the 
record is that every Southern jurist, Bushrod Washington 
among them, leaned to a liberal construction of Washing- 
ton's law, and to limiting the scope of Section 4 of Article 4 
of the Constitution. 

The record is that at the first session of the Indiana State 
legislature, which convened the first Monday in December, 
1816, Dennis Pennington "sat in" as a leader, as a senator 
from Harrison County. He drafted and led in passing an 
act entitled "An Act to Prevent Man Stealing," which was 
approved December 17, 1816. While this statute imposed 
penalties for stealing free negroes, there were the same pains 
and penalties for aiding the escape of fugitive slaves. 

At the 18 18 session of the Indiana legislature, Dennis 
Pennington supplemented his man-stealing act with what 
was known as the Joint Resolution of December 31, 181 8: 

Whereas, sundry persons destitute of every principle of 
humanity are in the habit of seizing and carrying off and selling 
as slaves free persons of color who are or have been for a long 
time inhabitants of this state, . . . 

Therefore, most solemnly disavowing all interference between 
those persons who may be fugitives from service and those citi- 
zens of other states, whenever such claim is legally established, 
we deem it our just right to demand the proofs of such claim to 
service according to our laws: 

Resolved, that our senators in Congress be instructed and 
our representatives be requested to use their exertions to prevent 
Congress from enacting any law, the provisions of which will 
deprive any person, resident of this state, claimed as a fugitive 



42 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

from service, of legal constitutional trial, according to the laws 
of this state, before they shall be removed therefrom. 

At the November term, 1818, of the Harrison County 
Circuit Court, Dennis Pennington caused three Kentuckians 
to be indicted for violating the provisions of his man-stealing 
act. In the night time they broke open the dwelling house 
of Susan, a woman of color, and forcibly carried her off to 
Kentucky. Governor Jonathan Jennings made a requisi- 
tion of Governor Gabriel Slaughter (kin of the man who 
became Mr. Gresham's first law partner) of Kentucky, for 
the return of the indicted men to Indiana for trial. One 
count in the indictment was based on the Federal statute. 

For several years the correspondence went on between 
the two governors. Finally Governor Slaughter refused to 
honor the requisition. For aught that appeared in the 
papers, he said, the Kentuckians may have exercised their 
constitutional right of seizing their runaway slaves the same 
as they would their runaway horses, and therefore no crime 
had been committed. 

March 26, 1826, Pennsylvania amended her statute for 
the abolition of slavery and to prevent kidnapping, by im- 
posing certain penalties, including imprisonment, on all who 
removed from the State of Pennsylvania negroes claimed as 
runaways, without first securing from some judicial officer 
a warrant authorizing that removal. At the hearing to 
be held before the warrant was to issue, the claimant, the 
master, could not be a witness. 

Speaking of this statute, Dennis Pennington said: 
"Little Joe Story decided all our fugitive slave laws, in- 
cluding that which President Washington signed, uncon- 
stitutional." ^ 

Little noticed and not understood by the historians, but 
first brought to the attention of Walter Q. Gresham by 
Dennis Pennington and discussed with Judge Otto, who, we 
have shown, had been bred to the law in Pennsylvania, and 

1 16 Peters 539. 



THE "underground RAILROAD" 43 

with his legal preceptor, was the construction the Supreme 
Court of the United States in 1842, in an opinion by Justice 
Story, put on the fugitive slave section of the Federal Con- 
stitution in this celebrated Prigg case, and the action of 
the Abolitionists and some of the Free States under it. 

An indictment was returned in York County, Pennsyl- 
vania, against Prigg and others for removing Margaret 
Morgan, a fugitive slave, to Maryland, without a warrant 
as the Pennsylvania statute provided. The Supreme Court 
of Pennsylvania upheld Prigg's conviction, and then the 
case went to the Supreme Court of the United States, where 
it was argued by the respective attorney-generals of Penn- 
sylvania and Maryland, and other eminent counsel. It 
was really a controversy between the two States. And 
after all, there is some reason for the phrase, "The war 
between the States." 

In the teeth of the argument that in the Free States color 
raised no presumption of servitude, of the constitutional 
provisions that "no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, 
or property, without due process of law"; that the people 
shall be secured in their persons against unreasonable 
seizures; and that the word "claim" was used in the sense 
of "a challenge of ownership," the Supreme Court of the 
United States reversed Prigg's conviction, and in an opinion 
by Justice Story said that the constitutional provision of the 
Federal Constitution, namely. Section 4 of Article 4, was self- 
executing when the master could secure the possession of his 
slave without a breach of the peace, that is, that in the Free 
States the master could lay hands on his slave the same as 
on his horse and then could lead the slave home the same as 
he could his horse, using all force necessary. This opinion 
further held the Pennsylvania statute unconstitutional, 
which required the claimant of a fugitive slave, after he had 
secured possession of the slave, to apply to a State officer 
for a certificate before he could remove the slave from the 
State ; that the power to enforce the constitutional provision 



44 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

of the United States was exclusively in Congress; that in so 
far as the act of 1793 attempted by the machinery of the 
Federal courts and Federal officers to enforce the provision 
for the return of the fugitive slaves it was constitutional, 
but it was unconstitutional in imposing duties on the State and 
State officers in the rendition oj slaves. Not only this, this 
case decided that a State might by law prohibit its officers 
and agents from taking any action to enforce Section 4 of 
Article 4 of the Constitution of the United States. 

Chief Justice Taney, in a dissenting opinion, pointed out 
the absurdity of a State commanding its officers to refrain 
from enforcing one of the provisions of the Constitution of 
the United States, a measure that had made the union of 
the States under that Constitution possible. 

Although the court proceeded to a decision on the theory, 
as Judge Story said, that it would make such an exposition 
of the Constitution and the laws as would "put at rest the 
conffict of opinion" on the question which involved "as 
delicate and important considerations as had ever come 
before it," the Prigg case proved a wedge with which the 
Abolitionists helped split the Union. At the succeeding 
session of the Massachusetts legislature in 1843, Wendell 
Phillips, the Abolitionist lawyer, forced Massachusetts to 
pass an act prohibiting its executive and judicial officers 
from performing any acts in enforcing the pro-slavery clause 
of the Constitution. The Vermont, Connecticut, New 
Hampshire, and Pennsylvania legislatures followed the lead 
of Massachusetts. These acts, as amended, became known 
as the Personal Liberty Laws. The act of February 18, 
1793, stripped of most of its provisions, and supplemented 
by the Personal Liberty Laws as amended, left the slave 
owner practically where he was under the Articles of Con- 
federation. In 1850 there were 500 of Wendell Phillips's 
clients, fugitive slaves living in security in and about 
Boston. 

It was the Prigg case and the discovery of gold in 



THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD 45 

California that gave us the Compromise of 1850, otherwise 
we might have had war then. 

The slave power counted on the yoo,ooo square miles 
of territory acquired from Mexico — for that was why the 
Mexican War was begun — becoming slave territory. John 
P, Hale, the Free Soil Democrat, objected to the exten- 
sion of the Missouri Compromise, or the 36° 30' line, to the 
coast, because it carried with it the implication that slaves 
should be recognized south of it, and then the discovery of 
gold in the Sacramento River spoiled it all. Immediately 
there was a rush to California from all over the Union and 
from many parts of the commercial world. Soon the Cali- 
fornians called a convention — at which were many dele- 
gates from the South, — adopted a free constitution which 
was ratified on a referendum, elected a. set of State officers, 
two congressmen, and two senators, and began hammering 
on the doors of Congress for admission into the Union. 
The pro-slavery people threatened to secede if California 
was admitted as a Free State. To that end, Mississippi, 
in the Summer of 1849, called a convention to meet at 
Nashville in June, 1850. In 1863, at Natchez, I sat with 
my husband at the dinner table with Judge McMurran,' 
who had been a delegate from Mississippi to that Nashville 
convention. Never, said Judge McMurran, did the mass 
of the large slaveholders want the issue to go to war; com- 
promise always was the plan. 

Two miles beyond Pennington's Chapel, to the north- 
west, and farther out on the Vincennes Road, stands to-day 
the brick house close to the big spring that succeeded the 
log house on the site where John Davis, Walter Q. Gres- 
ham's maternal grandfather, first settled. Thither Walter 
Q. Gresham was first carried, when a toddling infant, by his 
mother. The mother rode horseback with the boy behind. 
A natural "woodsman," a quality she transmitted, she cut 
across the country, leaving Corydon to the south. Thence, 
from Pennington's Chapel, Walter Q. Gresham often went 

iSee pages 248 and 282. 

4 



46 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

after he was transplanted to Corydon. After our marriage 
I visited in that brick house. It was then occupied by 
Uncle Tom Davis and his family. To-day it is the home 
of one of the fourth generation. 

Among the California gold seekers were Anthony and 
Anderson Davis, two of the brothers of the mother of 
Walter Q. Gresham. Anderson Davis died early. Anthony 
turned all his resources into cash and moved his family to 
the Willamette Valley in Oregon, where his descendants 
have prospered. 

An ex-office holder under Andrew Jackson, Anthony 
Davis remained a Democrat to his death. On behalf of the 
Gresham family, Walter Q. Gresham became the corres- 
pondent with Uncle Anthony. It was not gold the boy was 
interested in, and Uncle Anthony wrote back to his brother 
Tom that the boy had a wonderful 'grasp on the slavery 
question, and a bright future before him. 

Uncles Henry, John, and Robert Davis, with their fam- 
ilies, lived on sections adjoining the John Davis homestead. 
Aunt Betsy, married to Enoch Martin, Aunt Mahaly to 
George Seacat, and Aunt Nancy to David A. Askren, lived 
with their growing families near by. Aunt Polly, married 
to Abraham Stevens, lived just over the line in Washington 
County, not far from Fredericksburg, and close to John 
Rankin, the keeper of the first station on the Underground 
Railroad north of Corydon. On north in those formative 
days, crossing the main line of the Vincennes Road at Han- 
cock's Chapel, Walter Q. Gresham rode one of Uncle Tom's 
horses to visit Uncle Abe and Aunt Polly. Uncle Abe was 
then classed as an Abolitionist, while the Martins were all 
"suspects." 

Older by twenty years than Dennis Pennington, John 
Davis, the grandfather, lived to be almost one hundred, 
dying in the early '50's. From the time Walter Q. Gresham 
knew him, he lived with and was cared for by Aunt Nancy. 
Although his strong anti-slavery views caused him to seek, 



THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD" 47 

with his growing family, the wilds of Indiana Territory, 
John Davis was a considerate, charitable, and kindly man, 
and to the last a Democrat. But he was a strong Union 
man, and he read Daniel Webster's speeches. His sons, 
Thomas, Henry, and Robert, joined the Republican party, 
while Anthony, Anderson, and John adhered to the Demo- 
cratic. Several brothers of John Davis, great-uncles of 
Walter Q. Gresham, with their growing families, settled in 
that neighborhood. Many of the offspring migrated to 
Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, and Missouri. At one time one of 
them said to me, "We had 900 on the list, and then we quit 
counting." The women were good housekeepers, and the 
men were then, and still are, mainly prosperous farmers — 
the best type of American citizen — seldom officeholders, 
but usually having a representative on the board of county 
commissioners or in the legislature. There was not a poet, 
a philosopher, nor an Abolitionist among them. They did 
not believe in burning the barn down to get rid of the 
rats. They were Union men and believed in law and 
order, although they went, as did Walter Q. Gresham, to 
hear Walter Pennington preach. The best of the New 
England Abolitionists never surpassed Walter Pennington 
in denouncing "the divine institution." He spared not 
even the author of the Declaration of Independence nor the 
Father of his Country for continuing to own negroes in the 
teeth of their efforts to provide by law for emancipation. 
The Reverend Walter was fond of commending Thomas 
Worthington, a Virginian, who led off in freeing all his slaves 
(fifty in number) and provided homes for them in the North- 
west Territory. Coles also did the same, and settled in the 
Illinois country, and likewise the "poor white trash" who 
"toted" his single "nigger" to the land of freedom. 

The Davises, who remained Democrats, helped Walter Q. 
Gresham in all his political contests in 1854 and 1855, and in 
i860. One bright morning in July, 1863, I served breakfast 
to one of the Davises of mature years, with George Seacat 



48 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

and David Askren. In the late hours of the night they had 
ridden in to join the Home Guards. Later, with their 
squirrel rifles, I saw them, outnumbered seven to one, march 
out to meet the Morgan veterans supported by artillery. 

Even after it had become an Abolitionist war, as it was 
called after the Emancipation Proclamation, the poets and 
philosophers and ''the friends'' did not go in. Wendell 
Phillips was taunted for staying at home. But it has always 
been thus. It was so in the South. Many of the extrem- 
ists and fire-eaters did not fight. It was the man who 
resisted secession the longest who stayed to the surrender. 
Coming up from the South, I have several times stopped at 
Waynesville, North Carolina, where Major W. W. Spring- 
field, late C. S. A., resides. Said the Major: "At Straw- 
berry Plains, Tennessee, where I was born and raised, I 
resisted secession to the last, but Mills Shultz, who out- 
talked and out-voted us, stayed at home, while I enlisted 
as a private and surrendered as a major at Appomattox. 
And would you believe me, when I went to vote the first 
time after the war, there was Mills Shultz to challenge my 
right to do so because I had been in the Rebel army!" 

When the final test came, and the extremists and most 
of the Abolitionists stayed at home, many of the third 
generation of the Davises went into the Union army as vol- 
unteers — some as officers, some as mere boys in the ranks. 
Except those who were killed or badly wounded, they stayed 
to the end. Walter Davis, at sixteen, joined the Forty- 
ninth Indiana as a volunteer. He said: "I served four 
years without a wound, but they almost marched me to 
death — six times across Kentucky, then clear down to 
Savannah, up through the Carclinas, and down the ave- 
nue in the Grand Review." Rodolphus, in the ranks of 
the Fifty-ninth Indiana, was close to my husband when he, 
as a division commander, was shot in front of Atlanta. 
The next morning "Dolphus" helped carry the wounded 
cousin from camp to the box car, and as the train was held, 



THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD" 49 

went back with the detail and brought out McPherson's 
body in a pine box, which was shoved into the car with the 
wounded men as the train pulled out for Nashville.^ 

From the start, President Taylor, a slaveholder, a Ken- 
tuckian by birth, a citizen of Louisiana, had encouraged the 
settlers to organize. In December, 1849, in one of the 
ablest messages ever submitted to Congress, written by 
Reverdy Johnson, his attorney-general, and predicated on 
the Declaration of Independence — that the people of each 
State or territory were of right entitled to such laws as they 
desired for their own local government — the soldier presi- 
dent pressed the claims of California. The threats of the 
hotheads to secede brought counter threats that the first 
overt act would be met with the armed forces of the United 
States, led by the "Old Warrior " himself. He surprised the 
slaveholder, as well as the boy whose anti-slavery views had 
led him to wish in 1848 that he were of age so that he might 
vote for John P. Hale of New Hampshire and George W. Julian 
of Indiana. Many a time I have heard Walter Q. Gresham 
discuss these two men. The daughter of John P. Hale, and 
her husband, William E. Chandler, Secretary of the Navy 
in President Arthur's cabinet, became our warmest friends. 
It was a friendship that did not abate when Walter Q. Gres- 
ham became Secretary of State in a Democratic cabinet. 
Aid and comfort that the Republican Senator Chandler 
offered to Democratic Secretary of State Gresham could not 
be received for fear of offending some of the Democrats. 
Mrs. Chandler was devoted, to use a Southern word, to 
Mr. Gresham, and there never was a brighter or sweeter 
Yankee woman. 

Too much ice water on July 4, 1850, ended Zachary 
Taylor's career, and then Henry Clay put through the last 
compromise on the slavery question, and the Nashville 
convention adjourned sine die. 

The compromise of September 11, 1850, of which Henry 

1 See page 302. 



50 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

Clay was the author, admitted California as a Free State; 
organized territorial governments in Utah and New Mexico, 
to be admitted as Free or Slave States, as the people of those 
territories might ultimately determine; abolished the slave 
trade in the District of Columbia; and with a sweep of the 
pendulum to the extreme of the Federal power, ignoring 
almost every fundamental principle of right and justice, 
rewrote the Fugitive Slave Law on lines that would have 
astounded Washington and his advisers. 

The Fugitive Slave Law, as amended September ii, 1850, 
provided for additional United States Commissioners, one 
to be appointed in each county, if necessary, who was author- 
ized on the production of a certificate under the seal of a 
court of the State from which the fugitive had fled, giving a 
description of the alleged fugitive, to issue his warrant to 
the United States marshal for the apprehension of the negro 
described in the certificate. The marshal might, at his 
discretion, without any showing to the court, if he had reason 
to believe there would be resistance, call on any citizen to 
aid him in enforcing the writ. On the apprehension of the 
fugitive, the only question to be tried by the commissioner 
was the identity of the fugitive, as set forth in the certificate 
— and this too without a jury. "In no trial or hearing 
under this act shall the testimony of such alleged fugitive 
be admitted in evidence." "No writ or habeas corpus 
should issue to release an alleged fugitive." "The com- 
missioner shall receive a fee of $5 in the event of the re- 
lease of alleged fugitives, and $10 in the event he remand 
him to the custody of the alleged owner." The reason for 
the difference in the compensation, as expressed in the act, 
was because of the difference of the labor required of the 
commissioner. In the event the fugitive was remanded to 
the custody of the owner, the commissioner should give him 
a long certificate, reciting all of the proceedings, whereas, 
if the fugitive was released, there was a simple order and 
certificate to that effect. Additional penalties were imposed 



THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD 51 

on those who aided the fugitives to escape. MunicipaHties 
and counties, where there were rescues of fugitive slaves, 
were made Hable to the owners for the value of the slaves, 
while the municipality or city where the rescue occurred 
was given the right to recover from the parties making 
the rescue. 

Samuel J. Wright, always forcible and keen, "but often 
unfair," as Walter Q. Gresham afterwards described him, — 
"Slick Samuel," his opponents called him, — took up the cry, 
"It's unconstitutional!" Promptly the Supreme Court of 
Wisconsin so held, and it was several years before the 
Supreme Court of the United States could get a record and 
pronounce the law constitutional. 

However it might be in the other States of the Union, 
in the five States carved out of the Northwest Territory — 
viz., Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin (and 
eminent lawyers still contend that in the last named States 
the ordinance of July 13, 1787, is the supreme law of the 
land) — it was claimed and argued with force that Congress 
could not, under the fugitive slave section of the National 
Constitution, deprive even a negro of his natural, inherent, 
and inalienable rights of life, hberty, and property, and the 
means of their preservation or of due process of law, that is, 
of a writ of habeas corpus or a jury trial with the right to 
testify, because in the ordinance of July 13, 1787, for the 
organization of the Northwest Territory and the States to 
be organized out of it, among the guaranties to the people 
thereof and their descendants were the natural rights of 
man and the means of their preservation, or "due process of 
law." These and the other personal and political guaranties 
embedded in the ordinance were among the considerations 
for the pro-slavery clauses of the National Constitution. 
It was the first compromise on the slavery question.^ 

While most of the Virginians who made for the Northwest 

1 speaking of the deal and the part Massachusetts took in putting it through, Wendel 
Phillips said: "If a Yankee saw a dollar on the other side of hell, he would jump for it at the 
risk of falling in." 



52 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

conceded that the pro-slavery people got the best of the 
first compromise, they said Henry Clay out-traded them 
in the second — that is, in the Missouri Compromise — for 
all of the territory of the Louisiana Purchase, under the 
treaty with Napoleon whereby it was acquired, was slave 
territory. It was the pride of the Penningtons, Rumleys, 
and most of the Davises, that their anti-slavery views were 
not of New England origin but were brought with them 
from Virginia. I have heard Walter Q. Gresham say, 
"Thank God, none of my ancestors prospered or grew rich 
in the New England carrying trade — swapping beads and 
rum for men in Africa, and then selling these men in Georgia 
and South Carolina at a good price." The morals under- 
lying much of New England commercialism he scorned. 

As late as 1844, a Clay delegate to the Baltimore con- 
vention, a Clay elector, and on the stump that year for the 
"Mill Boy of the Slashes," Dennis Pennington was always 
first and last a Union man. He admired Andrew Jackson 
as he did a bulldog — his courage but not his brains. It 
was Webster's argument that justified Jackson's threat to 
hang Calhoun. "Study law, my boy, and the history of 
your country, and be prepared to meet them on the stump, 
but always stand by the Union," was the old man's advice. 
Had Dennis Pennington lived in i860, he would undoubt- 
edly have favored another compromise, for he pointed out 
what Calhoun said about that of 1850: "Another such and 
we are gone." 

Neither did Wendell Phillips deny the constitutionality 
of the new law. He and Theodore Parker met it with open 
resistance in the streets of Boston, asking the conscience 
Whigs, "Where is your free constitution ? " Meantime they 
had whipped New England into a frenzy over the immor- 
ality of the Prigg case and of one of the decisions of another 
eminent New England jurist, Chief Justice Shaw of Massa- 
chusetts, and so discredited her greatest man, Daniel Web- 
ster, that that impress is still on the man of letters. They 



THE 'UNDERGROUND RAILROAD" 53 

broke Benjamin R. Curtis as a judge when he succeeded 
Justice Story on the Supreme Bench of the United States. 

"Goad the slaveholder to madness," said the Aboli- 
tionist lav^ryev. "If the slaveholder will give up Section 4 
of Article 4 of the Constitution, we will have him up against 
the Sommerset case, and with it as a premise we will control 
the pubHc opinion of Great Britain, and consequently her 
government, against him." 

Tracing his lineage back to the Mayflower, inheriting 
a competency, a graduate of Harvard, with excellent pros- 
pects for a valuable private practice and pohtical prefer- 
ment, both of which he gave up in order, as he said, to 
represent three milHon human beings "who stood mute 
within our civilization and our laws," Wendell Phillips 
demonstrated he was the best informed and ablest lawyer 
of his time. But a lawyer with a single client is always a 
dangerous man in a community. If consideration for the 
unfortunate whites, whose destiny for the time being at 
least was tied up with the bondsmen, can be laid aside — 
Walter Q. Gresham always kept them in mind' — then the 
advocate of unconditional and immediate abolition must be 
rated the clearest sighted and boldest statesman America ever 
produced. The distinction, as the Frenchman put it, is the 
difference between "men of the nation and men of the bar." 

From the time of the Prigg decision, Wendell Phillips 
held Massachusetts as a legal entity out of the Union. 
Jefferson Davis made that point in his farewell address in 
1 86 1, and as a reason why the Southern brothers should be 
permitted to depart in peace. He said that in 1850 he had 
opposed the coercion Daniel Webster then exerted on the 
people of Massachusetts. And so well did Webster, as 
the head of the Fillmore administration, enforce the law, 
that Wendell Phillips after a time advised the fugitives they 
were no longer safe in Massachusetts, and unless they were 
prepared to resist by taking human life, they should flee 
to Canada. 

ISee Chapters XVI and XIX, especially page 326. 



54 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

Webster was a patriot when he forced South Carolina — 
with the fiery Jackson making concessions — to live up to a 
tariff law that bore heavily, but an apostate and Ichabod 
when he made the people of Massachusetts — the State that 
seconded South Carohna's motion for a pro-slavery consti- 
tution — obey the law of Congress passed in pursuance of 
that constitution and warned Massachusetts what might 
be the consequence of her disobedience. 

The student had learned the "hang" of the office under 
the big elm tree with the reports and the briefs, when Daniel 
Webster, a heartbroken man, on October 29, 1852, breathed 
his last at Marshfield, to be vindicated even by Wendell 
Phillips, as well as Abraham Lincoln. Webster's last words 
were: "A few Abolitionists have more influence than I 
and all the pubHc men in America." Five months before 
Webster's demise, Henry Clay had died, at the National 
Hotel in Washington. 

Long before Walter Q. Gresham formally began the study 
of the law, he had read many of Webster's speeches. In 
the log schoolhouse he had declaimed, as many another 
schoolboy has done, before and since, that prayer of Webster 
in his reply to Hayne: "When my eyes shall be turned to 
behold for the last time the sun in heaven, may I not see 
him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a 
once glorious union; on states dissevered, discordant, bellig- 
erent, on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, 
in fraternal blood." History will rate Webster a great 
statesman, as well as a great lawyer.^ 

A thorough mastery of the pro-slavery provisions of the 
Constitution of the United States, of the legislation and de- 
cisions under it, and of the slave code of Kentucky, as a 
part of his legal education, satisfied Gresham that the theory 
of Wendell PhiUips and William Lloyd Garrison, possibly 
potential in the end, but harsh and cruel, was wrong. Their 
first premise that slavery was immoral merely confirmed 

ISee page 139, 



THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD" 55 

his mother's teaching and the promptings of his own heart. 
But their second premise — and the Springville Resolutions 
anticipated them by twenty years — that the Constitution 
of the United States was per se a pro-slavery instrument, 
did not support their conclusion that the Fugitive Slave 
Law be defied and the Union destroyed. He was confirmed 
in this by the opinion of John C. Calhoun, that the preser- 
vation of the Union meant in time the extinction of slavery. 

It was in those formative days that Walter Q. Gresham 
learned, as he afterwards often remarked, that it was at 
the Hartford convention of 18 14 that secession, at least in a 
practical way, was first suggested, and this fact he always 
afterwards kept in mind when considering the action of the 
men who went into the rebellion. 

The convictions of Henry Clay,^ as expounded by Daniel 
Webster, he grasped as correct, namely, that if the Union 
could be held together, the growth and development of the 
country and public opinion would, in time, bring about 
the abolition of slavery without violence and bloodshed, 
and with compensation to the slaveholders. In short, 
Walter Q. Gresham never was an Abolitionist. Moreover, 
he used his influence with the young men about Corydon 
to abate the activities in the Underground Railroad. He 
came to the conclusion then, as he afterwards maintained, 
that a State, the same as an individual, whether an anti- or 
a pro-slavery man, should obey the Federal power in the 
exercise of all its legitimate functions. His pro-slavery 
friends, his Kentucky friends, and the lawyers from Bran- 
denburg down the river to Cloverport and back in the 
State to Hardinsburg and Elizabethtown, never doubted 
his good faith when he told them that he was glad that 
Indiana had no personal liberty laws on her statute books 
such as those of Massachusetts. Because these laws were 
unconstitutional and furnished a pretext for secession, he 
was against them. 

iSee page 139. 



CHAPTER III 
THE KANSAS-NEBRASKA BILL 



"squatter sovereignty — CORRESPONDENCE WITH 

SALMON P. CHASE THE ELECTION OF 1854 ATTEMPT TO 

DEFEAT WILLIAM H. ENGLISH, DEMOCRATIC MEMBER OF 
CONGRESS WALTER Q. GRESHAM ANTI-NEBRASKA CANDI- 
DATE FOR PROSECUTING ATTORNEY ASIATIC CHOLERA 

"know-nothing" riots in LOUISVILLE BLOODY MONDAY 

GRESHAM ON THE STUMP HELPS ORGANIZE THE REPUB- 
LICAN PARTY. 

WALTER Q. GRESHAM was reviewing his studies 
preparatory to admission to the bar when the country 
was thrown into a frenzy by the Kansas- Nebraska Bill. 
No measure was ever less understood, aroused greater 
opposition, or was more far-reaching in its effects. To-day 
the layman and the; publicist seem to be equally ignorant 
as to what it really was and just how it operated. 

January 23, 1854, Senator Stephen A. Douglas, as 
chairman of the Committee on Territories of the United 
States Senate, reported his third amended bill to organize 
the territory west of Missouri and Iowa — the remaining 
portion of the Louisiana Purchase —into two territories, 
Kansas and Nebraska, with or without slavery, as the 
people might desire; because, as the bill declared, Section 
8 of the Missouri Compromise, which prohibited slavery 
north of the line 36° 30', the southern boundary line of 
Kansas, was "inoperative" in that it was superseded by 
the Compromise of 1850, which had refused to extend 
the 36° 30' Hne to the coast; the purpose being, as the 
bill declared, that "Congress shall neither legislate slavery 
into any of the territories or States, nor out of the same; 

50 



THE KANSAS-NEBRASKA HILL 57 

but the people shall be left free to regulate their own do- 
mestic concerns in their own way, subject only to the Con- 
stitution of the United States." 

As the bill finally emerged from the committee, Salmon 
P. Chase, one of the anti-slavery leaders of the United 
States Senate, and an Independent Democrat, as he styled 
himself, denounced it as a gross violation of a sacred pledge, 
and in an address previously prepared and that day started 
broadcast over the land, called on the anti-slavery people 
to defeat the purpose "to exclude from a vast unoccupied 
region immigrants from the Old World and free laborers 
from our own States, and convert it into a dreary region of 
despotism, inhabited only by masters and slaves." 

The law student at once wrote Senator Chase, which 
started a correspondence that was kept up for years, and 
perhaps accounts for the fact that in i860 Gresham was 
for Chase rather than Mr. Lincoln in the nomination for 
President. 

In the debate that followed, in the Spring of 1854, on the 
Kansas-Nebraska Bill, Senators Chase, Seward, and Sum- 
ner, representing the anti-slavery sentiment, and Senators 
Bell, Huston, and Davis the pro-slavery side, the moderates 
and extremists were no match for Senator Douglas. 

From the accepted doctrines that the people of the 
States were accorded the right to determine their own 
domestic concerns. Senator Douglas argued the same right 
should be accorded the people of a territory, and they 
should begin to exercise that right as soon as the govern- 
ment of the United States intrusted them with a territorial 
government. 

When, later on, the practical operation of the Kansas- 
Nebraska Bill was what neither the anti-slavery nor the pro- 
slavery people expected, sides were changed. Among the 
first to see the effect it would have — the making of Kansas 
into a Free State — and to give his approval to the principle 
upon which it was constructed, was Walter 0. Gresham. 



58 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

By 1856 the extreme pro-slavery Secessionists, led by 
Senator Robert L. Toombs of Georgia, perceived what had 
become plain to the young lawyer the year before, that 
the practical workings of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill would 
make of Kansas a Free State. It was for this reason that 
W. L. Yancey and the extremists wanted to defeat Doug- 
las's nomination, and especially to repudiate as a party 
measure the doctrine of "Squatter Sovereignty." 

In February, 1861, after the pro-slavery men had se- 
ceded because Douglas held their party to what Mr. Lincoln 
called "Squatter Sovereignty," aiRepublican Congress, 
Charles Sumner and William -H. Seward sitting mute, copied 
the Kansas-Nebraska Bill verbatim in bills for the organiza- 
tion of the territories of Colorado, Dakota, and Nevada. 

In 1883, while Mr. Blaine was writing his " Twent}^ Years 
in Congress," I heard him discuss the operation of the 
Kansas-Nebraska Bill with Mr. Gresham in our library in 
Washington. If, as Mr. Blaine says in his book, and as he 
said to my husband, Charles Sumner, Salmon P. Chase, 
and Wilham H. Seward owed an apology to the memory of 
Daniel Webster for the maledictions they heaped upon him 
for his seventh of March speech, which was mainly in sup- 
port of the proposition of the Compromise of 1850 to make 
Utah and New Mexico territories with the right to adopt 
or reject slavery, then it must be admitted, as my husband 
said to Mr. Blaine, that much of the criticism in the year 
1854, and afterwards, of Senator Douglas, was unjust, and 
that history must, as it will, do him that justice which Mr. 
Blaine does not accord him. 

Senator Douglas could not have been ignorant of the 
Springville Resolutions^ and the effect of Congress giving 
them heed. But he never mentioned them. Disclaiming 
all sympathy with the bondsman, was the lawyer's way of 
advancing a principle of government that made for the 
bondsman's freedom and caused Abraham Lincoln to de- 
nounce him as the best AboHtionist of them all. It was 

1 See pages 2i and 22. 



THE KANSAS-NEBRASKA BILL 59 

inside the ropes and under the Constitution of the United 
States that Douglas fought. 

In 1854 the Kansas-Nebraska Bill centered the atten- 
tion of the people of the second Indiana congressional dis- 
trict on their congressman, William H. English of Lexington, 
Scott County, who was then serving his second term. 
When, on May 2, the bill passed the House with many 
Democratic votes against it, but with "Bill" English and 
many Whig members from the South for it, an organiza- 
tion at home was started to defeat Mr. English's re-elec- 
tion. In this movement Walter Q. Gresham was partic- 
ularly active. On August 30, 1854, a convention, which 
was called "The People's Convention," assembled in New 
Albany and nominated Thomas C. Slaughter, the senior 
member of the firm of Slaughter and Gresham, as the Anti- 
Nebraska candidate for Congress. 

In addition to helping manage the Slaughter campaign, 
Walter Q. Gresham became the Anti-Nebraska candidate 
for prosecuting attorney for the Court of Common Pleas in 
the district composed of the counties of Harrison, Crawford, 
Orange, and Washington, against T. S. Ganiott. Much of 
the time Mr. Slaughter was kept out of the contest because 
of his ill health and on account of the illness and death of 
his eldest son. Many of his appointments to speak were 
filled by his young partner and George P. R. Wilson, a Ken- 
tuckian who had come at an early date to Harrison County 
and married a daughter of Spier Spencer, who fell at Tippe- 
canoe while in command of the Harrison County troops 
at that battle. Except when he was engaged in public 
affairs Mr. Wilson lived on a large farm in the western part 
of the county. He had then been a member of the Indiana 
legislature for ten terms, and in 1845 had failed as a Whig 
candidate for Congress when pitted against that remarkable 
man, Robert Dale Owen, who as a Democrat in the midst 
of the war advanced some of the most important arguments 
for its prosecution to a finish.^ 

1 See page 200. 



6o LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

The masses of the Democrats at first looked on the 
Kansas-Nebraska bill as a violation of the pledge embodied 
in the Missouri Compromise; but party lines were strong, 
WiUiam H. English was a good campaigner, and the people 
easily led. The New Albany Ledger, in a leading editorial 
June 2, 1854, denouncing the bill, concluded as follows: 

"If it is to be organized it ought to be as a free territory. 
It is a violation of twice-pHghted faith for the benefit of a 
presidential candidate and ought to fail." But on Septem- 
ber 16 the same paper said: "When Mr. Slaughter says, 
'We denounce the repeal of the Missouri Compromise by 
the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, as a violation of 
twice-pledged faith,' Mr. Slaughter says that for which he 
has not a particle of reason or shadow of proof." 

In this contest Judge Slaughter, who was a man of 
singular purity of character, as well as of ability, came 
nearer defeating Mr. Enghsh than ever happened in the 
long career of the latter gentleman. Two years before, 
Mr. EngHsh's majority was 2,500; that year he led Mr. 
Slaughter by only 536. Democrats like Thomas A. Hen- 
dricks, with good majorities behind them, were easily de- 
feated that year. The Anti-Nebraska men had a majority of 
11,000 in Indiana. There was an Anti-Nebraska majority 
returned to the next Congress. Ganiott was elected prose- 
cuting attorney, but young Gresham carried Harrison Coun- 
ty by a vote of 1,328 to 1,276, the only candidate who did 
so on the Anti-Nebraska ticket that year. Notwithstanding 
the bitterness of the poKtical contest, the acquaintance then 
formed by young Gresham with William H. English ripened 
into a friendship that was never afterwards broken. Of all 
the Democrats that Indiana produced, Mr. EngUsh was, 
in my judgment, the ablest. Less gifted than many others, 
he surpassed them all in force and practical sense. 

The year 1855 was marked by an epidemic of cholera 
and by the "Know-Nothing " outbreak against the foreigners 
and the Roman Catholics in Louisville. One morning early 



THE KANSAS-NEBRASKA BILL 6i 

in the summer I went to market with my mother, a negro 
carrying our basket. As we passed along Market vStreet, 
where the hacks stood, one of the drivers tumbled from his 
box. The report at once spread that he was attacked with 
Asiatic cholera. My mother hastened home and we were 
all rushed off to Cedar Glade at Corydon. Before this, 
the disease had made its appearance at many points on the 
Ohio River. There were many deaths in Louisville and at 
other places, and it was not until late in the fall that the 
ravages of the plague were stopped. 

The American or Know- Nothing party had prevailed in 
many of the municipal elections throughout Kentucky in 
the Spring of 1855. It was equally successful at the State 
and congressional elections in August of that year. It 
elected Governor Moorehead and a majority of the mem- 
bers of Congress. Being a foreigner by birth, my father's 
opposition to it was somewhat akin to its prescriptive 
nature. He went from Corydon to Louisville to vote 
against it at the August election, but the Know-Nothings 
carried the day, which has gone into history as "Bloody 
Monday." In Louisville there were riots in which a score 
of men were killed and many more wounded. 

Fortunately my father returned to Corydon before the 
news of the riots reached us. The commotion which these 
events created in a household such as ours can better be 
imagined than told. For a time we were more frightened 
at the word "Know-Nothing" than at the mention of the 
Abolitionists. The impression produced on my father 
was never effaced. The riots were described with great 
detail, and we were told how George D. Prentice and Lovell 
H. Rousseau saved the Irish from a general massacre and 
the Catholic Cathedral from destruction by fire. My 
father had always subscribed for the Journal, which George 
D. Prentice had established years before as the Whig organ 
but primarily in the interests of Henry Clay. When he 
went over to the Democracy because of the Know-Nothing 



62 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

craze, my father changed newspapers — stopped the Journal 
and took the Courier, the Democratic organ. But after 
"Bloody Monday," although the Courier continued to be 
my father's paper, the Jotirnal was invariably delivered at 
the house and read by him, though there was much in the 
charge of the Courier that it was Prentice's intemperate 
editorials before and on the day of the election that had 
brought about "Bloody Monday." 

Following the excitement over the Know- Nothing riots 
in Louisville, there was the greatest interest in Harrison 
County, Indiana, over a local election, which brought home 
not only to every voter but to every man, woman, and child 
the Kansas-Nebraska trouble. In correspondence with the 
young lawyer, Salmon P. Chase repeated the advice he had 
urged upon the people of the United States in the debates 
in the Senate the year before, that they manifest in every 
concrete form possible their opposition to the plan, as he 
claimed, of the Kansas-Nebraska bill to make Kansas a 
Free State. 

July I, 1855, the county commissioners of Harrison 
County ordered a special election to be held on the 15th of 
October following, to fill vacancies in the offices of the 
county clerk, county treasurer, and county commissioner. 
Here was an opportunity for the young lawyer. Walter Q. 
Gresham did not want the office of county clerk, as it would 
take him out of the practice of his profession, but as a candi- 
date for that office he would have an opportunity to organize 
and advance the ideas of the men of the Anti-Nebraska 
sentiment. He accepted the nomination on the Anti- 
Nebraska ticket for clerk, with Hamilton Tressewriter for 
treasurer, and Reuben W. Reynolds for commissioner. 

The Democrats presented as their candidate for county 
clerk, WilHam H. McMahon, a worthy man. They nomi- 
nated Samuel Douglass for treasurer and Jacob Tense for 
commissioner. Mr. McMahon had been chief deputy clerk 
for years, and as such had managed the office to the 



THE KANSAS-NEBRASKA BILL 63 

satisfaction of everybody. He was a deservedly popular 
man, but did not pretend to be a public speaker. So the 
young lawyer challenged the Democrat lawyers to a joint de- 
bate to discuss the Kansas- Nebraska bill. They appointed 
Simeon K. Wolf, an ex- Whig and afterwards a Democratic 
member of Congress, to meet him. They had a joint 
debate in the public square in Corydon, and then met in 
every schoolhouse in the county. 

George P. R. Wilson could not be induced to join the 
new political organization (it was not yet the Republican 
party and the name " Republican " was not heard that year 
in Harrison County), but he volunteered to take the stump 
for his young friend and against his old enemy, the Democ- 
racy. He would not forgive the Abolitionists for their 
denunciation of his idol, Henry Clay ; but he approved of all 
the denunciation the Abolitionists could heap on the Demo- 
cratic organization. Even in 1856 Mr. Wilson was still so 
inoculated with the virus of slavery that he refused to join 
the Republicans, and voted for Fillmore, the Know-Nothing 
candidate for President. He died in 1857. 

Great meetings were held in the woods, and the old and 
the young man addressed them. Mr. Wilson is said to have 
surpassed any of his previous efforts. As one enthusiast 
said, who had frequently heard Mr. Clay speak, he equaled 
Mr. Clay when the latter was at his best. The aid Mr. 
Wilson thus rendered (and it was the only aid he received 
on the stump in that contest) the young man never forgot. 
Forty years later, out of a hst of eligibles, he induced Presi- 
dent Cleveland to advance one of George P. R. Wilson's 
sons, a regular army officer in every way qualified, when 
General Scofield, then in command of the army, urged the 
promotion of another officer. 

In his address, after reviewing all the historical and 
legal objections to the system of African slavery that had 
come to him from his Virginia and Kentucky ancestors, the 
young man claimed that the discussion had been opened 



64 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

by the Kansas-Nebraska bill on the theory that it had been 
necessary by the Compromise of 1850 to repeal the Missouri 
Compromise, and that hence he was free to discuss and 
criticize those provisions of the Compromise of 1850, namely, 
those sections of the Fugitive Slave Law which bore so 
harshly on the alleged fugitive and had no regard for the 
sensibilities of those who thought slavery immoral and 
wrong. He would accord to the master all his constitutional 
rights. State laws that interposed obstacles to the master's 
recovering his runaway slave were unconstitutional and 
wrong and should be repealed, but the fugitive slave provi- 
sion of the Constitution of the United States did not con- 
template that Congress should offer a cheap bribe to a judi- 
cial officer of the United States, either to do or fail to do his 
duty, five dollars to a United States commissioner when he 
set the black free but ten dollars when he certified him 
into slavery. Neither did the framers of the Constitution 
expect that the United States marshal would make every 
man, regardless of his feelings, a "nigger catcher." 

"If the negro was the same kind of property as a horse, 
why was there not in the Federal Constitution some provi- 
sion for the reclamation of runaway horses?" he asked. 
The constitutional provision and the law of Congress to 
enforce that "personal service" conclusively demonstrated 
there could be "no such thing as property in man." 

He further argued that while the Kansas-Nebraska bill 
had not been passed in good faith, now that it operated con- 
trary to the expectations of its author and his cohorts, it 
was not being and would not be enforced in good faith by 
the National administration, dominated as it was by the 
slave power. He stated that only the preceding March 
President Pierce had removed Governor Reeder, the first 
governor of Kansas and the man he (Pierce) had appointed 
under the Kansas-Nebraska act, because Reeder had set 
aside the first election in Kansas for the reason that many 
of the actual settlers of Kansas, anti-slavery men, had been 



THE KANSAS-NEBRASKA BILL 65 

driven from the polls before they could vote, by border 
ruffians from Missouri, who stuffed the ballot boxes and 
then returned home. Mr. Gresham said: "I opposed the 
Kansas-Nebraska bill, but now that I see how it operates, 
I am for it. . . The only way, my good honest Democratic 
friends of warm and generous anti-slavery sentiments, to 
free the Democratic organization from the control of the 
slave power, is to vote it out of office." 

In addition to the challenge to the Democratic lawyers, 
an offer was kept up to meet all comers in joint debate. 
John Mathes, an auctioneer and a local celebrity, who had 
been a member of the legislature and began all his speeches 
with the statement, "I have voted for every Democratic 
candidate for President from Andy Jackson down," named 
Lowden's schcolhouse in Spencer Township as the place 
where he would like ''to trim the young sapling.'' Of that 
Lowden schoolhouse debate Walter Q. Gresham never heard 
the last. In his native township, Franklin, and in Spencer 
Township, there were many Germans, but, contrary to the 
usual rule, these Germans were pro-slavery in their views. 
Taking these views as a text, the Germans were severely 
arraigned for fleeing from absolutism and persecution in 
their native land, only to side with it or the slave power in 
this. He jarred a few of them from their prejudices, but not 
many. Invective and denunciation sometimes shames a 
man into abandoning a position he cannot be reasoned out 
of. It was a weapon which Gresham knew how to use 
and did use in private as well as in pubHc. Growing out of 
the fierceness of this debate, the story was fabricated and 
embodied in an affidavit and spread broadcast that the 
young man had said: "It was not necessary that the 
American or Know-Nothing party should ask me to join 
their ranks, as I have an American heart. I grew up in the 
town of Lanesville, where it was almost impossible for the 
Americans to get to the polls because of the presence of 
dirty, long-eared Dutch. They are paupers and criminals. 
5 



66 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

The penitentiaries, jails, and poorhouses of the old country 
were emptied, and that is how they came here." 

Although he denied having at any time uttered such 
sentiments, the fact that he did not deny that he had joined 
a Know-Nothing lodge before he was a voter was cited as 
evidence that he had used these identical words. Debarred 
from the Whig party because of its pro-slavery tendencies, 
he said, he joined the Know-Nothings, but as soon as he 
learned that party's narrowness and proscriptive nature, he 
at once abandoned it. Unlike many men who were after- 
wards prominent, he never denied that he had been a mem- 
ber of that organization. 

When the votes were counted, Walter Q. Gresham was 
defeated by a vote of 1,447 to 1,340. But he received more 
votes than any of his associates. Almost everywhere else, 
except in Ohio, where Salmon P. Chase was elected governor 
by a fusion, there was a lessening of the vote in opposition 
to the Kansas-Nebraska bill. The increase in the number 
of votes cast over the year before, when the excitement was 
great and a State ticket and a congressman were to be 
elected, shows the interest that, without the aid of a news- 
paper, had been aroused in the public mind. It also satis- 
fied Mr. Gresham, as he afterwards repeatedly said, as to 
the response the people of his native county, although 
largely settlers or descendants of settlers from Slave States, 
would make when they were finally satisfied of the decep- 
tion, as he claimed, that was being practiced on them. It 
also convinced him of the correctness of the proposition that 
the people could be trusted to rule themselves, and that on 
all domestic and local questions they and their local tribunals 
should be followed by the National courts. It was a prin- 
ciple he afterwards strictly adhered to when on the Federal 
bench. 

My father scrutinized closely all the young men who 
paid attention to his daughters. He disliked the anti- 
slavery views of the young man who was attentive to 



THE KANSAS-NEBRASKA BILL 67 

me. As did all men of foreign birth, he particularly disliked 
the American or Know- Nothing party. With him it was 
"Once a Know-Nothing, always a Know-Nothing." Before 
the subject of marriage was mentioned, my father told me 
he did not like the political principles of my youthful 
admirer; he rated him both an Abolitionist and a Know- 
Nothing, and he said that while there was no possible objec- 
tion to him as a man of character, he could not encourage 
his suit. Meanwhile my mother had died, but in my grand- 
mother my husband-to-be had a warm advocate and admirer. 

The school years of 1855-56 and 1856-57, I was in 
school in Corydon, Louisville, and at the boarding school 
at Bardstown, Kentucky. All the girls at Bardstown were 
from Southern families, and my sisters and I were regarded 
as such. They considered it "awful" that I had an Aboli- 
tionist for a sweetheart. One day Mrs. Crosby, the wife 
of the principal of the school, sent for me and gave me a 
small package she had just received for me through the 
mail. It was opened in her presence. It satisfied her when 
I said, "How glad I am to get Cousin Walter's picture." 

Lucy Brown, of Georgetown, Kentucky, was a special 
friend of my sister Lyde. Frequently on Fridays Lyde 
would go home with Lucy to stay over Sunday. Lucy's 
brother George often brought them back to school. Sue 
Simmons, one of my special friends, lived a few miles from 
Bardstown. I often went home with her for Saturday and 
Sunday. There was a large family of the Simmons; among 
them were two brothers, George and Reese Simmons. 
Later on I will tell you how I met George Simmons and 
George Brown as Confederate officers commanding the 
advance guard of the Morgan raids through Indiana and 
Ohio.i The Simmons family had a large farm and many 
slaves. One of our amusements there was to get one of the 
old darkies to start his fiddle and see the little pickaninnies 
come out of the cabins in swarms and dance. 

One of my intimates and a part of the time my room- 

1 See page 236. 



68 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

mate was a bright, charming girl named Carrie Taylor. 
Her mother, a widow, was a wealthy woman living just 
south of Louisville. We frequently visited each other. 
On one of my visits to the Taylors, I met Zeb Harney, the 
young man Carrie subsequently married. His father, Major 
Harney, was the editor and proprietor of the Louisville 
Democrat. Through my friendship for the Taylors and 
the Harneys, I induced my father to subscribe for the 
Louisville Democrat. Afterwards the war wrought havoc 
with the Taylor estate and the Democrat. 

The distinction of that time between the simple anti- 
slavery man, the RepubHcan-to-be, and the Abolitionist, 
was not beyond the understanding of a young woman who 
at least wanted to see the difference, if there was one. Be- 
sides, in a household that was pro-slavery, with sisters both 
older and younger who were given to criticizing and ridi- 
culing in the privacy of the home every young man who 
showed any one of us special attention, I was forced to learn 
the distinction between a Republican and an AboHtionist. 
But this vast difference the pro-slavery people of the South 
did not understand: and the anti-slavery people of the North 
never seemed fully to realize it. The Abolitionists were care- 
ful to keep up the delusion in the Southern mind. They 
purposely compromised every Northern leader in the eyes 
of the Southern people. Southern girls could not under- 
stand that a Republican or a simple anti-slavery man was 
not an Abolitionist. With them there were only two 
classes — pro-slavery men and Abolitionists, The horror 
the Abolitionists excited in the minds of Southern women 
has never been appreciated by the Northern people, especi- 
ally by the Northern historians. 

The first platform of the Rei^ublican party was based 
on the Declaration of Independence, the maintenance of 
which it declared was necessary to preserve the Constitu- 
tion of the United States. In the light of these principles 
the Constitution should be interpreted. It declared that 



THE KANSAS-NEBRASKA BILL 69 

all the territory of the United States should be free, and 
demanded the admission of Kansas at once as a Free State. 
But it disclaimed any purpose to interfere with the domestic 
institutions of any of the States. By bringing Kansas and 
other Free States into the Union, the Republicans — at least 
those Republicans with whom I was closely associated — 
believed slavery would be so restricted that public senti- 
ment would, without violence or bloodshed, bring about in 
time abolition, but with compensation to the slave owner. 
On the other hand, the Abolitionists' platform was "Imme- 
diate and unconditional abolition." They claimed that 
fairness and good faith precluded the interpretation of the 
Constitution in the light of the Declaration of Indepen- 
dence, for the fathers who drew the Constitution intended 
it should be a pro-slavery instrument. But because it was 
immoral they would not obey it. 

Prior to 1856 there was no political organization in 
southern Indiana under the name Republican. The Repub- 
lican party was organized as a National party at a confer- 
ence held at Pittsburgh, February 22, 1856. Slaughter and 
Gresham aided in sending a representative to this confer- 
ence, and Mr. Slaughter was made one of the delegates 
from the second Indiana congressional district to the first 
National Republican Convention that met at Philadelphia, 
pursuant to the Pittsburgh call, and nominated Fremont 
and Dayton. The junior member of the firm went on the 
stump that year for "the Pathfinder," as Fremont was 
called. 

An incident that happened during this campaign marked 
the first meeting of Walter Q. Gresham and Oliver P. Mor- 
ton, afterwards Indiana's "War Governor," and explains 
why Mr. Gresham never deferred to Mr. Morton as did 
many men, although he rated Mr. Morton's intellect as 
the strongest that had appeared in the Senate since Mr. 
Webster's time. Up to 1854 Oliver P. Morton was a Demo- 
crat, but in 1856 he and Conrad Baker were the Republican 



70 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

candidates for governor and lieutenant-governor of Indiana 
against Ashbel P. Willard and David Turpie, the Demo- 
cratic candidates. 

When Mr. Morton came to southern Indiana campaign- 
ing, a large crowd assembled in a grove near Corydon early 
in the afternoon to hear him speak. While Godlove S. Orth 
was making his address, according to the program, and 
before it was Mr. Morton's turn to speak, Mr. Willard 
appeared in front of the stand, interrupted Mr. Orth, and 
said he was there for the purpose of discussing the public 
questions of the day with Mr. Morton, and desired to know 
if he could be accommodated. Mr. Morton stated that he 
and Mr. Willard had been unable to make arrangements for 
a meeting, and t*hat he could not then enter into a joint 
discussion with Mr. Willard, as other gentlemen had been 
advertised to speak with him. Mr. Willard then turned 
to the crowd and said that all who wished to hear him 
speak should go to the court house. More than half of 
those present followed him. Mr. Gresham was on the plat- 
form at the time, and immediately on the conclusion of the 
meeting told Mr. Morton that under no conditions and on 
no pretext could he afford to avoid meeting Willard, that 
rather than that he should retire from the stump, and that 
in southern Indiana he should be as aggressive in opposition 
to slavery as he was among the Quakers of Wayne County. 
Morton acquiesced, met Willard at Leavenworth the next 
day, and followed up that meeting with joint discussions 
at other points. With Conrad Baker the young lawyer 
canvassed the district, and the friendship then formed was 
never broken. But it was different with Oliver P. Morton. 

In the Cincinnati Convention of 1856, by reason of the 
two-thirds rule, Douglas was defeated for the nomination, but 
with a majority of the convention behind him, he first wrote 
the platform in which he pledged his party and its candi- 
date to the principles of his Kansas-Nebraska bill, and non- 
intervention by Congress with slavery in State and territory. 



THE KANSAS-NEBRASKA BILL 71 

Then James Buchanan, who had been, during all the 
Kansas-Nebraska trouble up to that time, the American 
minister at the Court of St. James, was made the Demo- 
cratic candidate for the Presidency. He was acceptable to 
the Douglas Democrat and the extreme pro-slavery Demo- 
crat alike, because he had no record, and although John C. 
Breckenridge of Kentucky was named for the Vice- Presi- 
dency, George D. Prentice and his Journal delivered Ken- 
tucky's electoral vote to Fillmore and Donelson, the Know- 
Nothing candidates. 

The pledges that Senator Douglas made in his speeches 
throughout the country that his party and its candidates 
would honestly and in good faith stand by the Kansas- 
Nebraska Bill, that is, that they would admit Kansas as a 
Free or Slave State as the people of Kansas might determine, 
held in line enough Democrats of free-soil tendencies to elect 
Buchanan. Willard was elected governor of Indiana by 
6,000 majority. WilHam H. Enghsh, who pledged him- 
self to the principles of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, was re- 
elected to Congress by a majority of 2,650 over his oppo- 
nent, John C. Wilson, of New Albany. Many men that 
year, both North and South, masqueraded behind the Amer- 
ican or Know-Nothing party, which presented Millard Fill- 
more, of New York, and Andrew J. Donelson, of Tennessee. 
The popular vote was for Fillmore, 974,536; for Fremont, 
1,341,264; for Buchanan, 1,838,169. In Kentucky, Fre- 
mont received but 386 votes. 

Four years later, when Douglas again wrote the platform, 
the Yancey crowd, in the meanwhile permeated with Pren- 
tice's ideas against the squatters, bolted. 



CHAPTER IV 
MARRIAGE — CAMPAIGN OF 1858 



MARRIAGE AND WEDDING TRIP — NEWSPAPERS — BUCHAN- 
AN REPUDIATES KANSAS-NEBRASKA BILL — ATTEMPTS TO 
ADMIT KANSAS AS A SLAVE STATE — DOUGLAS DENOUNCES 
AND DEFEATS BUCHANAN — KANSAS REJECTS ENGLISH BILL. 

FEBRUARY II, 1858, we were married. The practice of 
law, and the Brandenburg affair, one of its incidents, 
the campaign of 1858, and the Lincoln-Douglas Debate, 
which all dovetailed together, were of absorbing interest 
that year to Walter Q. Gresham. 

Our wedding trip was by stage to Louisville, and thence 
by boat to Leavenworth, Crawford County, to attend court. 
On our return to Corydon we boarded with, or rather were 
the guests of. Colonel Posey, a venerable gentleman, digni- 
fied and courtly, a Virginian by birth and a son of one of 
the territorial governors of Indiana. He was a client of the 
firm of Slaughter and Gresham, and a great friend of my 
husband. 

In a few months we left Colonel Posey's and went to live 
in a house on one of the hills at the edge of the town. Here 
our first-born arrived. Many were the good suppers we 
had there with Dr. Mitchell Jones as the chief guest. Fish- 
ing was a great pastime for my husband and for Doctor 
Jones. There were then bass in abundance in Indian Creek 
at the edge of Corydon, and in Blue River, a larger stream 
farther west which was the dividing line between Harrison 
and Crawford counties. In April, 1859, we purchased a 
house within a city block of the Constitutional Elm. The 
site was most desirable, and with some remodeling we had 
what I thought was the most attractive two-story cottage 

72 



MARRIAGE — CAMPAIGN OF 1858 73 

of the town. In those days every one raised his own vege- 
tables. We had a fine garden. 

At this time the office of Slaughter and Gresham was on 
the second floor of a small building that stood in the public 
square near the court house. It had but one room upstairs, 
with windows on three sides and a door on the fourth, which 
was reached by a flight of stairs from the outside. My 
husband was full of jokes, good spirits, and good humor, 
and there was not too much shop talk at the home. At 
night when it was necessary to work on a case, it was done 
at the office, which was not far away. 

There were a good many trials before justices of the 
peace in the outlying townships in Harrison County. While 
I never was in court nor present at the trial of any of 
these cases, I sometimes rode with my husband ; but instead 
of attending the trials, would visit, when in the western 
part of the county, some of the Davises, relatives of his 
mother. On these occasions my husband often took along 
his rifle, and while he never professed to be a crack shot, 
he could easily bring down a gray squirrel from the top of 
the tallest poplar tree, often putting the bullet through 
its head. 

When it came to newspapers we had Horace Greeley's 
anti-slavery New York Tribune, the Louisville Journal, ed- 
ited by George D. Prentice, and the Louisville Democrat, 
edited by my friends, the Harneys. 

My husband and my father both knew George D. Pren- 
tice personally, and frequently discussed his future and that 
of his paper. Prentice, as we have suggested and shall see, 
was the most influential political writer of his time.^ Of 
him Henry Watterson said: "He not only did the writing 
but also the fighting for his party; he was intellectually the 
match for any man; he was physically and mentally afraid 
of no man." But Mr. Prentice was wanting in that sound 
judgment that is the gift of some less favored mortals. 
Conservative at first as a follower of Henrv' Clay, after 

1 See page 97. 



74 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

Mr. Clay's death he drifted to the support or leadership of 
the extreme pro-slavery Secessionist propaganda.^ 

The Louisville Democrat, my paper, was pro-slavery. 
It was edited with ability, discernment, and sound judg- 
ment, but not with the brilliancy that Prentice displayed 
in the Journal. Prentice, in advocating the claims of the 
slaveholder, went beyond my father's paper, the Courier. 
He attacked Douglas and "Squatter Sovereignty" with all 
his logic and sarcasm. The Kansas-Nebraska bill, he said, 
was anarchy pure and simple, in that it substituted the rule 
of the mob, that of the first few squatters in a territory, for 
the judgment of the legislators of the whole people. Major 
Harney warned his contemporaries and his readers that 
Prentice was not a Democrat, and should not be permitted 
to undermine the Democratic faith with the old Federal 
and Whig principles about the supreme power of Congress 
over slavery in the territories, for if that principle was 
adopted the first Congress that was in control of the anti- 
slavery people would at once exclude the slaveholder from 
the territory. Of course the Harneys and their paper were 
partisans of Senator Douglas. 

My father never failed to let us know what extreme 
views on secession were foreshadowed in his Louisville 
Courier and among the business men of Louisville. He did 
not quit active business in Louisville until the Fall of 1862. 
With all an Irishman's wit and deftness, he was fond of 
discussing with his "Abolitionist son-in-law" the current 
politics of the day. Every question hinged on secession. 
My father believed in secession, and he believed and said, as 
did most Secessionists, that the anti-slavery people, "the 
Abolitionists," would not fight. It was only when he talked 
thus that he annoyed my husband, who was a man who 
never made threats. He answered my father in a letter 
which I will quote later on, written during "the advance on 
Corinth." Always clear in his ideas, tolerant of the opinions 
of his fellows, and anxious to get the standpoints and study 

1 See page 97. 



MARRIAGE — CAMPAIGN OF 1858 75 

the workings of the minds of others, my husband encour- 
aged my father and all guests to express their views. It 
was thus I heard every phase of the slavery and secession 
question discussed. It was a part of our life. 

My husband's friend, Judge W. T. Otto, was the Repub- 
lican candidate for attorney-general in 1858 against Joseph 
E. MacDonald, the Democratic candidate. Partisan lines 
had been drawn, and George A. Bicknell had defeated Judge 
Otto for re-election to the bench. In later years I knew 
Joseph E. MacDonald well. The personal interest was 
heightened by the controversy over the slavery question. 

"It will be easy to make a campaign against the Democ- 
racy of this year," said Walter Q. Gresham. "If Kansas is 
allowed to vote herself into the Union as a Free State, as she 
undoubtedly will, the slave-ocracy will lose its control of the 
National government ; if they break faith with the principles 
of the Kansas-Nebraska bill — the Douglas platform — and 
keep Kansas out of the Union by denying her a fair election, 
it is only a question of time until the control of the govern- 
ment will pass into the hands of men of reasonable and 
conservative views on the slavery question." ^ 

One evening Samuel J. Wright came to call. He was no 
longer auditor of Harrison County, but proprietor of one 
of the two flourishing mills of the town and a general all- 
round business man. He was greatly excited. His first 
words were, "Bill Enghsh is goin' to flop." Always alert, 
"Slick Sammy" had with him a newspaper containing 
an elaborate speech by William H. English, who as the 
member of Congress from our district had been one of 
Senator Douglas's friends to block President Buchanan's 
efforts to admit Kansas under the Lecompton Constitution. 

In this speech Mr. English set forth the advantages of 
the representative theory of government, and the disad- 
vantages and dangers of the referendum. The latter was 

1 At the meeting of Congress, 1859, the pro-slavery senators removed Senator Douglas 
from the chairmanship of the Committee on Territories. 



76 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

not in accordance with the Republican theory of govern- 
ment. While he would not deny that the Free Soilers in 
Kansas were in a majority — two to one — over their oppon- 
ents, the voice of the people, he said, was not the voice of 
God, and the representatives of the entire people knew what 
was better for the nation than a few settlers in a territory. 

Finally, on April 3, Mr. English proposed what was 
called the English bill. It provided that the people of 
Kansas could vote on August 3 on the proposition as to 
whether they would come into the Union under the Lecomp- 
ton Constitution — but they were without power to change 
its slave provision to a free one ; in other words, they could 
only come into the Union by adopting a slave constitution. 
As an inducement, or further bribe, as it was called, the En- 
glish bill provided that if the Lecompton Constitution was 
adopted the new State would have a land grant of 20,000,000 
acres; but, on the other hand, if the Lecompton Constitution 
were rejected, Kansas would not only lose the land grant 
but could not become a State until she had a population 
of 94,000, the ratio for a representative in Congress. 

Over Senator Douglas's opposition, the English bill be- 
came a law. 

Mr. English's "flops" almost cost him a renomination 
and then an election. It was his good fortune on August 3 
to have the people of Kansas decide by a vote of two to 
one — 10,000 to 5,000 — to stay out of the Union rather than 
adopt the Lecompton Constitution. So long as Kansas 
did not actually become a Slave State, and John M. Wil- 
son, the New Albany lawyer, was the opposition candidate, 
the masses of the Democrats of the second congressional 
district were content to vote for English's re-election. 
Mr. Wilson's private and professional life was vulnerable, 
and on these lines in their joint discussions, Mr. English, 
who was an aggressive and forcible campaigner, as well as 
a man of physical courage, pressed the contest. 

As a public man Mr. English was thoroughly discredited. 



MARRIAGE — CAMPAIGN OF 1858 77 

Mr. Gresham and the other stump speakers argued that 
he had broken his own pKghted faith, as well as that of 
his party, on the Kansas question. The strictures that my 
husband and his friends had passed on Douglas in the previ- 
ous campaign were withdrawn, and he and the principles of 
his bill were lauded to the skies. The settlers of a territory, 
so long as they prepared to organize their government on the 
principles of the Declaration of Independence, were a safer 
guide than Mr. English and his associates in Congress, who 
proposed to legislate on the lines of the slave code of South 
Carolina. His reduced majority, the vigor with which he 
was attacked, which no man could forever endure — it had 
been kept up since 1854 — and the bitterness of the contest 
that he said privately he knew was to come, led Mr. English 
to announce that he would retire at the end of his term in 
March, 1861. He did so, and went into the banking busi- 
ness at Indianapolis. 

My husband was much disappointed that Mr. Mac- 
Donald had defeated Judge Otto for attorney-general by 
a small margin, less than 2,000. In the legislature the 
Republicans and the Anti-Lecompton Democrats were 
in a majority. 



CHAPTER V 
THE BRANDENBURG AFFAIR 



WALTER Q. GRESHAM S LAW BUSINESS — THE BRANDEN- 
BURG AFFAIR — HEROISM OF HORACE BELL — ADJUSTMENT 
OF THE CONTROVERSY WHICH PROMISED TO END IN WAR — 
STATUS OF SLAVEHOLDERS AS TO WAR — STANLEY YOUNG 
KILLS COLONEL MARSH. 

SLAUGHTER and Gresham were the attorneys for the 
New Albany & Corydon Plank Road Company, the 
only corporation operating in the county. In 1859 the 
firm of Slaughter and Gresham was dissolved. This became 
necessary because Mr. Slaughter was commissioner in so 
many partition suits and administrator of so many estates, 
that he could not attend to his share of the firm's business. 
My husband continued alone in the practice. He had all 
kinds of litigation, and much of it in volume. He had suits 
on notes, foreclosures of mortgages, mandamus proceedings, 
and was employed to assist the Democratic prosecuting 
attorney in much of the criminal business. He succeeded 
in convicting one defendant who feigned sickness and was 
brought into court on a cot. He defended successfully 
another defendant under indictment for murder. In the 
Crawford Circuit Court, representing some creditors, after 
a long contest he got a judgment on a verdict of jury for 
$30,000 against the silent partners of a firm which owned a 
line of steamboats; but during his absence in the army it 
was reversed by the Indiana Supreme Court and the claim 
was lost. There were Kentuckians on both sides of that 
lawsuit. In those days there were scarcely any business 
corporations. The steamboats on the Ohio River were 
owned and operated almost entirely by individuals. During 

78 



THE BRANDENBURG AFFAIR 79 

the special session of the legislature in the Spring of 1861, 
my husband came home long enough to bring a number 
of lawsuits, all of which he turned over to Mr. Slaughter. 
During the first year of the war Mr. Slaughter sent him 
a statement of his business, from which it appears he 
had two score Kentucky clients scattered along the river 
as far down as Cloverport and back into the country to 
Ehzabethtown and Hardinsburg, the county seats respec- 
tively of Hardin and Breckenridge counties. 

His most dramatic case was one which grew out of the 
ever-present slavery question, which was known as the 
"Brandenburg Affair." It was an extreme example of the 
peculiar conditions then existing along the border, and 
was so serious that for a time fear existed that it might 
bring on war. It was so notorious that it was subsequently 
dramatized and staged. That it was finally settled without 
bloodshed was largely owing to the conciliatory spirit in 
which Walter Q. Gresham conducted his client's case. 

This client, Horace Bell, the hero of the "Brandenburg 
Affair," was the son of David J. Bell, who in 1839 had pur- 
chased the "Brandenburg ferry" and the farm in Harrison 
County, Indiana, on the Ohio River opposite Brandenburg, 
the county seat of Meade County, Kentucky. From the 
earliest times there had been a ferry at this point and a 
highway thence via Mauckport to Cory don. ^ Most of the 
people of the southern part of Harrison County, as the 
saying was, "did their trading" at Brandenburg. 

David J. Bell and his wife were of good Revolutionary 
War stock and were born and raised in Washingtontown, 
then a part of Virginia but thrown into Pennsylvania by the 
final location of the Mason and Dixon line. The operation 
of the constitution and laws of Pennsylvania freed the slaves 
of Mrs. Bell's father, who was a Wright. Another of the 
daughters, Julia Wright, became the wife of Doctor Jones 
of Corydon, and the mother of Doctor Mitchell Jones, 
my husband's most intimate friend. David J. Bell left 

1 See page 33. 



8o LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

Pennsylvania and settled first at Wheeling; thence in 1829 
he moved to New Albany, where in 1830 Horace was born. 
Oswald Wright, one of the former slaves of the father of 
Mrs. Jones, followed "Miss Julia" to Cory don and became 
one of the free negroes of the town. He lived in a small 
house that belonged to the elder Doctor Jones. The Bell 
children, better educated than was the custom of that time, 
went to school in Brandenburg, except the youngest boy, 
Charles. He had lived most of his life with his Aunt Julia. 
By 1857 Charles Bell's head was completely turned by the 
anti-slavery agitation of the time and by the stories his 
Aunt Julia told him about what the boys had dared in the 
early '50's. Had "Aunt Julia" lived in these days, she 
would have been a "militant." And her sister, Mrs. David 
J. Bell, was certainly a Spartan if ever a woman was one. 
In 1 85 1, when Horace Bell was twenty years of age, his 
father sold a negro boy he had "indentured," to a relative 
in Meade County, Kentucky, and with the purchase price, 
five hundred dollars, equipped Horace for migration to 
California, where John, the senior brother, had gone with 
the "forty-niners." Up to this time the elder Bell was not 
an Abolitionist, and he never afterwards admitted that he 
was one; neither did Horace Bell, although he lived right in 
the midst of the greatest activities of the Underground Rail- 
road in the late '40's and early '50's. I use the term Aboli- 
tionist in the technical sense of that time, an advocate of 
forcible resistance of the law. From California, Horace 
went to Nicaragua with the Walker Expedition. He served 
under Walker for two years, rising to the rank of major. 
Reports came back of his gallantry in battle, of his affairs 
of honor and of the heart. The fact that Walker's purpose 
was to establish slavery in Nicaragua satisfied some of the 
Kentuckians that the Bells were not Abolitionists, and they 
were not without friends and partisans among the best 
people and largest land and slave owners in Meade County. 
But many of the Kentuckians in 1858 believed and claimed 



THE BRANDENBURG AFFAIR 8i 

that the Bells not only assisted but had even encouraged the 
Kentucky slaves to leave their masters. I still share some of 
the prejudices of that time against the Bells. On the Indiana 
side it was the belief that no runaway negro was ever denied 
assistance by the Bells. David J. Bell had aided in captur- 
ing Levi Sipes after he had murdered my husband's father, 
and Horace Bell knew the Gresham boys, especially Walter. 

At this time there lived in Brandenburg a negro black- 
smith named Charles, who was the property of Dr. C. H. 
Ditto, a large slaveholder who lived in Meade County nine 
miles back from the river. Charles had a wife, Mary Ann, 
who belonged to A. J. Alexander, one of the merchants of 
Brandenburg. The pair lived near the river in a small 
house belonging to Alexander. Charles was a skillful work- 
man, a valuable slave, and so trusted that he was permitted 
to have a skiff in which he was allowed to cross the river 
to fish and to shoe horses for people on the Indiana side.^ 

On Friday evening, the 26th day of vSeptember, 1857, 
Charles Bell, a seventeen-year-old boy, and the negro 
Charles were seen in Brandenburg at the blacksmith shop. 
Later, about ten o'clock, Charles Bell started from the 
Brandenburg wharf boat in a skiff for the 'Indiana side. 
Early the next morning, Saturday, the slave gave it out 
he was going to the Indiana side to fish. This was the last 
ever seen of him in Brandenburg. On the Monday follow- 
ing, as he was not in the blacksmith shop in Brandenburg, 
the cry was raised that he had run away. It happened 
that on the same Saturday, starting early, the elder Bell 
rode on horseback across the country to New Albany, and 
thence by ferry to Louisville, for the purpose of cashing a 
draft Horace Bell had sent him from California. Return- 
ing home, he remained over Sunday in New Albany. On 
his journey back on Monday, when near home late in the 
afternoon, he was met by a party of Kentuckians, or "slave 
hunters," as the Bells afterwards called them, hunting for 
the missing blacksmith. They stopped the old man and 

1 See pages 37 to 41; also 100 to 102. 



82 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

proceeded to ask him where he had been and for what. 
He returned the curt answer, "It is none of your business." 
One night two weeks later, a party of Kentuckians sur- 
rounded the Bell house, which stpod just above high-water 
mark facing south towards the river, and by force removed 
the father, Charles Bell, and the free negro, Oswald Wright, 
to the ferry boat that lay at the Bell landing. Before the 
boat swung out into the river a Kentucky constable read 
a warrant, charging the Bells with having stolen the negro, 
Charles, and comm.anding that they be brought forthwith 
before a magistrate in Brandenburg. Kentucky had always 
claimed jurisdiction over the Ohio River to low-water mark 
on the Indiana side, and as the river was then low and the 
boat lay below the low- water line, the pretext was afterwards 
made that the apprehension was under the warrant. From 
the Brandenburg wharf the Bells and Wright were taken 
direct to the Brandenburg jail. The next day there was a 
preliminary hearing before the magistrate who issued the 
warrant. At this hearing it developed from the testimony 
of C. B. Johnson of Brownstown, Jackson County, Indiana, 
and Mrs. Withers of the same place, that after Johnson saw 
a reward offered in the newspapers for the return of the 
negro, Charles, he visited Corydon and the Bells at their 
farm under the guise of a horse trader ; that Wright confided 
in him that he had conveyed the negro, Charles, from the 
Bell farm to Brownstown on the Cincinnati & St. Louis 
Railroad; that Charles Bell told him that they had planned 
the escape of the negro, as Wright said he had done, and 
that Wright had loaned his free papers to Charles to help 
him along, should his right to freedom be questioned, and 
that they proposed next to carry off Mary Ann. But 
Mary Ann lived and died in Brandenburg. Charles escaped 
to Canada. Mrs. Withers identified Wright as a negro 
who came to her house in Brownstown on Monday morning, 
the 29th day of September, 1857, and said he had left a 
negro named Charles Ditto at the depot; and upon her 



THE BRANDENBURG AFFAIR 83 

agreeing to give them breakfast, Wright left and returned 
with the other, and she then gave them breakfast. That 
Wright should make this statement to a stranger — Mrs. 
Withers — as she admitted she was, the Bell attorneys 
afterwards claimed was most improbable. Wright denied 
he ever made such a statement. Both David and Charles 
Bell denied all complicity in the escape of the negro. They 
were remanded to the jail, and on the 25th of November 
the grand jury of Meade County returned six indict- 
ments against them.^ 

The elder Dr. Mitchell Jones was greatly excited when 
he heard of the arrest. He employed Judge Porter and 
Samuel Keen to defend the Bells and Oswald Wright. 
Judge Porter and Mr. Keen in turn employed T. B. Farleigh 
and John Coale of the Brandenburg bar to appear in court. 
This the Kentucky lawyers did with fidelity and ability. 
They took advantage of all the technicalities that due proc- 
ess of law afforded in defending their clients. 

Horace and John Bell immediately started for home 
from California when they heard of the kidnapping of their 
father and brother. They came back by way of Panama 
and the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. John got off the 
boat at Tobacco Landing, the first landing above Bran- 
denburg on the Indiana side, and went to his mother, who 
had remained in the meanwhile on the farm. This was in 
May, 1858. Horace went on to New Albany, then to 
Corydon, where he walked into Mr. Gresham's office and 
insisted that his boyhood friend should be his lawyer. At 

1 First: "Commonwealth vs. David J. Bell, Charles Bell, and Oswald Wright (a free 
man of color), charged with enticing Charles, a slave, to leave his owner. (Joint indictment.) " 

Second: "Commonwealth vs. David J. Bell, Charles Bell and Oswald Wright, charged 
with stealing Charles, a slave, from his owner." 

Third: "Commonwealth vs. David J. Bell, Charles A. Bell, and Oswald Wright, charged 
with enticing a female slave named Mary Ann to leave her owner." 

Fourth: "Commonwealth vs. David J. Bell, Charles A. Bell and Oswald Wright, charged 
with conspiring to run off a slave named Charles." 

Fifth: "Commonwealth vs. David J. Bell, Charles A. Bell and Oswald Wright, charged 
with conspiring to run off a female slave, Mary Ann." 

Sixth: "Commonwealth vs. Oswald Wright, charged with furnishing a slave named 
Charles with forged g.nd false papers," 



84 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

this time Horace Bell was a tall, handsome man. Stories 
told of him — many, no doubt, the product of the imagina- 
tion — did much to excite the popular mind. One was that 
he had twice appeared on the field of honor, and that 
while he had lived to tell the tale it was not so with his 
opponents, for he was a dead shot. 

Colonel William C. Marsh, soon after the kidnapping, 
raised a large force of armed men with the intention of cross- 
ing the river and releasing the prisoners. But the expedi- 
tion miscarried because the boats that were to transport 
Colonel Marsh's forces failed to reach Leavenworth, the 
meeting point, at the appointed time. There were on guard 
in Brandenburg, the Meade County Rangers, a company 
of militia, and several companies of the Kentucky Legion 
ordered there by the Governor of Kentucky to prevent 
the release of the prisoners. All were under the command 
of Captain Jack Armstrong, who had served with Horace 
Bell in Nicaragua. At first the return of Horace and John 
Bell added to the excitement. They were tendered the 
aid of five hundred men to invade Brandenburg. But 
acting on the advice of my husband, they publicly declined 
this offer. Then Horace Bell, although notified by letter 
that he would be promptly shot if he came to Brandenburg, 
went there with my husband and endeavored to secure a 
release of his father and brother on bonds. Alanson More- 
man and Olie C. Richardson, both slaveholders and two of 
the largest landowners in Meade County, offered to become 
sureties for the Bells in any reasonable amount, but the 
penalties named were so high that they refused to qualify. 
Bell was taunted on the streets of Brandenburg with being 
a coward. He afterwards claimed that but for the advice 
of his counsel, he could not have borne this. One day after 
an adjournment of court a crowd followed them to the 
hotel. Here Bell made a short speech. He said he did not 
propose to involve the States in a border warfare; that he 
had declined the aid of armed men; that he had come to 



THE BRANDENBURG AFFAIR 85 

Kentucky to get justice in the courts and, failing in that, he 
and his brother alone would come there in daylight, break 
the jail, and take the prisoners out. This, contrary to my 
husband's fears, the crowd regarded as a joke, and said 
that a man who talked as big as Horace Bell did would 
not attempt anything. 

Two weeks later my husband came home from Branden- 
burg greatly distressed. He had gone there about the Bell 
matter and while he, Horace Bell, and Colonel Marsh were 
standing in front of the Brandenburg Hotel talking, Stanley 
Young, from a balcony above, shot Marsh dead. They 
stood so close together that some of Marsh's lifeblood 
spurted on my husband's clothes. Colonel Posey was 
greatly excited and thought it strange that Stanley Young 
would risk shooting his own lawyer and friend in order to 
kill an enemy. Stanley Young was my husband's school- 
mate and one of his first clients. In my first chapter I 
described him and how Colonel Marsh killed his father. It 
was erroneously supposed that this was an incident of the 
Brandenburg affair, but it was not — Stanley Young merely 
took advantage of the excitement of the Bell kidnapping to 
kill the slayer of his father. He immediately escaped. He 
was indicted by the Meade County grand jury, but was 
never apprehended. His lawyer settled his father's estate 
and remitted to him his portion of it. He came back to 
Brandenburg and Corydon in 1863 with Morgan's Raiders, 
and died in southern Illinois a much respected and pros- 
perous citizen, but under another name. 

Among the efforts my husband made looking to the 
release of the Bells, he led a party to Governor Willard 
and demanded that he, as Governor of Indiana, demand of 
the State of Kentucky the return of the abducted men. 
But Willard refused to interfere. 

One day at noon Horace Bell walked into the office of 
Walter Q. Gresham. He had just ridden up from the 
Bell farm. My husband and his chent were alone. Bell 



86 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

told Mr. Gresham his plan was to disappear and have the 
rumor go out that he and his brother John had gone back 
to California. The quiet that would follow, he said, he 
thought would cause the Kentucky authorities to decrease 
the number of guards and relax their vigilance. Then, when 
the excitement was allayed, Horace Bell said, "My plan is 
for John and me to cross the river, surprise the jailor, re- 
lease father and Charles, arm them and get back to the 
Indiana side without firing a shot, if possible; otherwise, to 
fight." The only answer received was, "The audacity of 
your plan will almost warrant its success." Without an- 
other word Bell left the office and went back to the river. 

There was to be a picnic up the river, and Horace and 
John Bell calculated that many of the Brandenburg men 
would attend it. Meanwhile the report had gone forth 
that they had left for California. Horace, although the 
younger, was the leader. John doubted the success of the 
plan, but Mrs. Bell, who was at home sick, sided with 
Horace. 

On the 27th of July, 1858, just before noon, Horace and 
John strapped on their revolvers, and with a carpet bag 
loaded with six-shooters and ammunition, got into a skiff, 
with a fourteen-year-old mulatto boy as oarsman, and 
rowed over to Brandenburg. The boy was indentured to 
the elder Bell. He was the son of a distinguished Kentucky 
lawyer. 

In order to attract as little attention as possible, Horace 
took one street and John the other, south to the jail, which 
stood on the south side of the public square about one- 
quarter mile back from the river. Between the jail and 
the river, on the north side of the square facing south, was 
the court house in which were the arms and ammunition 
of the guards or minute men, who were the county officers, 
the lawyers, and the merchants of the town. The lawyers' 
offices lined the west side of the square. On the east side 
were the stores. As the Bell boys had calculated, most of 



THE BRANDENBURG AFFAIR 87 

the people of the town were at their noonday meal and the 
surprise was perfect. Horace reached the jail first. The 
jailor and his wife and two guards were at the dinner table. 
At the point of the revolver the dinner party was driven 
into one corner of the room ; but not soon enough to prevent 
one of the guards from jumping out of a rear window and 
giving the alarm, which created an awful din. Meanwhile 
John came in, got the jail keys from the bureau drawer, 
sprang upstairs, unlocked the jail doors, armed his father 
and Charles and locked the other prisoners in. Tempo- 
rarily Oswald Wright had been removed from the jail. 
Years afterwards I asked Horace Bell what he would have 
done with Oswald Wright had he found him in the jail with 
his father and brother. His answer was, "I don't know, 
he was no kin of mine." As the three came downstairs, 
Horace ran to the court house where the arms were stacked, 
before the minute men could assemble, and held them off 
as the others retreated to the river. The mulatto boy had 
proved faithful and was there with the skiff. As the Bells 
were descending to the levee, the crowd opened fire on them, 
but as the firing was from an elevation, the bullets passed 
over them. They returned the fire, purposely shooting 
high, which was enough to cause their pursuers to retreat. 
Then they rushed to their boat and without further moles- 
tation, except a few straggling shots, crossed safely to the 
Indiana side. No one was hurt. 

Horace Bell was the hero of the hour, and, as he himself 
afterwards said, did too much exulting and drank too much 
"John Barleycorn." On October 25, 1858, while quietly 
walking the streets of New Albany during the State fair, 
he was seized by three men, who pounced upon him from 
behind and rushed him to one of the ferry boats of the 
New Albany and Portland ferry, which, as had been previ- 
ously arranged, immediately put off to the Kentucky side. 
That night he was driven under strong guard to Branden- 
burg, and there locked up on the charge of having broken 



88 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

jail. Upon the report that expeditions were organizing at 
New Albany and Corydon to release him, he was removed 
next morning to Big Springs, a small town ten miles south 
of the river. Here, under guard, he was kept in the hotel 
until the next night. Meanwhile a large body of men from 
New Albany came down the river on a steamboat with two 
cannons on its deck, and anchored in front of Brandenburg. 
Part of the men from the steamboat joined a party from 
Corydon, who landed on the Kentucky side and camped 
upon the farm of Alonzo Norman above Brandenburg. 
The next night Bell was removed farther back into the 
interior to a schoolhouse. 

Meantime, as Captain J. M. Phillips — afterwards a 
successful member of the Chicago Board of Trade, then a 
merchant in Brandenburg — put it, "Walter Q. Gresham 
made overtures for a settlement, which was promptly 
sanctioned by the leading slaveholders of Meade County, 
as they deprecated the actions of the hotheads on their 
side and feared the complications that might ensue if Bell 
was detained too long. ... At that time Judge Gres- 
ham, although a young man, was well known and popular 
on the Kentucky side of the river, and when he came cam- 
paigning through the river townships of Harrison County, 
many Kentuckians always went over to his meetings." 

The agreement was that Bell was to have a preliminary 
hearing before the town magistrate of Brandenburg and be 
held to bail to appear at the November term of the Meade 
County Circuit Court, in bonds of $750. From the school- 
house, still under an armed escort. Bell was taken to the 
farm of Olie C. Richardson, where a sumptuous breakfast 
was served, and thence by a guard and escort of three 
hundred men to Brandenburg, where after a semblance of 
a hearing before two justices of the peace, he was released. 
Alanson Moreman and J. M. Phillips of Meade County, both 
slaveowners, and John R. Conners of New Albany, were 
accepted as sureties on his bond. But instead of appearing 



THE BRANDENBURG AFFAIR 89 

at the November term of the Meade County Circuit Court, 
as it was understood he would, Horace Bell returned to 
CaHfornia. The bond was declared forfeited, and at the 
May term in 1859, a judgment was rendered against the 
sureties. This judgment was subsequently satisfied by 
the executive branch of the Kentucky government in ac- 
cordance with the understanding had at the time that they 
would never be required to pay anything by reason of be- 
ing Horace Bell's bondsmen. "But," said Captain Phil- 
lips, "we could not get the prosecuting attorney to remit 
his fees and we had to pay him." 

The indictments against David and Charles Bell were 
stricken off the Kentucky dockets, but were never dis- 
missed. A civil suit in attachment, which had been begun 
on the 27th day of October, 1857, in the Meade County Cir- 
cuit Court under a pretense of jurisdiction against David and 
Charles Bell and Oswald Wright, to recover the value of 
the slave, and had passed into a judgment by default against 
the Bells and Wright in the sum of $2,000 and $100 respect- 
ively, was never attempted to be enforced in Indiana. Of 
course, in those days of discrimination in every State in the 
Union against the freedman, it was a difficult task for the 
Kentucky lawyers to free Oswald Wright. But "Tom" 
Farleigh, my husband's friend, whom we will meet again in 
a great emergency, came up to the best traditions of the 
American bar. It was agreed in advance it would not do 
for any lawyer from the north side of the river to appear 
for Wright. At the May term, 1859, Oswald Wright was 
placed on trial for stealing the negro Charles, and although 
the jurisdiction of the court was properly questioned, he 
was convicted and sentenced to the Kentucky penitentiary 
for five years. But so well had Farleigh and Coale done 
their work in their objections to the jurisdiction of the trial 
court, that Wright was soon released and returned to Cory- 
don, where he lived until his death. He was a good negro, 
industrious, and saved his earnings. By his last will he 



go LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

left his property, which consisted of two houses and lots, 
to Mrs. Julia Jones. 

Soon the Bell farm was sold, and David and Mrs. Bell 
went to Ohio and then to Missouri to live. John followed 
Horace back to California. "Charlie" Bell returned to 
Corydon and remained there until he enlisted early in 1861 
in the 20th Indiana Volunteers. He was killed before 
Petersburg in 1864, being then a captain but in command 
of his regiment. Seven regimental commanders ahead of 
him had met his fate. He was a gallant soldier, and the 
commission which would have still further promoted him 
never reached him. 

It was the behef in Corydon that David J. Bell knew 
nothing of the plan to "run off" the negroes Charles and 
Mary Ann, but there never was any doubt in the minds of 
the people that Charlie Bell planned and executed the escape. 
Horace Bell said he never inquired as to exactly what had 
happened before he returned from California. My husband 
uniformly said he was not called on to express an opinion, 
except that Kentucky had not acquired jurisdiction over 
the persons of the Bells and Oswald Wright. Considerate 
and deferential as he was, when the time came to act he 
never hesitated. In 1886 Horace Bell entered the news- 
paper field at Los Angeles. It was not long until he was 
sued for $300,000 damages for libel by "Lucky" Baldwin. 
In the prosecution of the suit, Baldwin assailed Bell on 
account of his record in the Brandenburg Affair. Bell 
appealed to United States Circuit Judge W. Q. Gresham 
at Chicago. The answer was : ' ' Your conduct from begin- 
ning to end in the Brandenburg Affair was praiseworthy 
and honorable." 

There was great exultation among the anti-slavery people 
along the border over the Brandenburg Affair. This my 
husband deprecated all he could. On the other hand some 
of the good people of Meade and adjoining counties in Ken- 
tucky approved the action of Horace and John Bell, and 



THE BRANDENBURG AFFAIR 91 

rejoiced in their successes. Doctor Ditto's brother, himself 
a slaveholder by inheritance, publicly commended Horace 
Bell for his gallantry. Captain Phillips afterwards told 
me: "I admired Horace Bell's nerve and was glad to go on 
his bond. Besides," he said, "I never was much of a 'nigger 
man.' My father left me a few slaves; I could not free 
them under the Kentucky law without giving a bond for 
their support. It was cheaper for me to keep them and 
support them than to enter into a bond with the State 
of Kentucky which might involve liabilities I could not 
foresee." 

Captain PhilHps was a fine type of Kentuckian, as well 
as a man of means and a far-sighted, clear-headed busi- 
ness man. When he was an operator on the Board of Trade 
the big men could not lower or raise the market too fast to 
catch him. He, as other men in 1861, saw the economic if 
not the moral side of slavery. At that time there were 
only 100,000 slaveholders in the United States. Ten years 
later, under the workings of the system their numbers would 
have been less. "The proposition to arm the slaves never 
found favor with the rich men of the South," as an old ex- 
Confederate once said to me. "A young able-bodied negro 
was too valuable an animal to be made the target for 
Yankee bullets." "A rich man's war and a poor man's 
fight," is a misnomer. It was not the large slaveholders 
who rushed Mississippi into secession, and it was the large 
slaveholders who helped to hold Kentucky back. 



CHAPTER VI 
THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES 



LINCOLN S HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF SPEECH, 
WHICH LED TO THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES — THE PRE- 
TEXT FOR SECESSION — THE DRED SCOTT CASE — MR. LIN- 
COLN'S ASSAULT ON CHIEF JUSTICE TANEY — THE DRED SCOTT 
CASE AS PART OF THE ABOLITIONISTS' SYSTEM OF AGITATION 
AND REVOLUTION. 

T HEARD much of the Lincoln- Douglas debates that 
-'- grew out of the "House Divided against Itself" 
speech. Again and again I heard my husband as a lawyer 
discuss that debate with the best lawyers in the land. It 
may be only a woman's idea, but if it be true that that 
speech, which contained the attack on Chief Justice Taney 
and the declaration that ' ' the Union cannot exist half slave, 
half free," and in which he said he would not obey the 
Dred Scott case if a member of Congress, made Mr. Lin- 
coln president, it also brought war and secession. 

There was wisdom in the advice of the twenty men, all 
anti-slavery and practical politicians, among them his law 
partner, to whom Mr. Lincoln submitted early in June, 
1858, at the State House in Springfield, that most famous 
speech in manuscript form. The judgment was unanimous 
that it should not be delivered. 

It was "unconditional and immediate absolutism." 
The thought was Wendell Phillips', the words only were 
Abraham Lincoln's. 

In the early days of his administration, Mr. Lincoln, in 
answer to a question as to what he would do, said: "We 
will manage to keep house some way." Keeping house, 
many women will admit, is not an easy task; less difficult, 

92 



THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES 93 

some assert, and the men have not entirely succeeded at 
it, than running the government of the United States. 
In the ultimate analysis the two are not entirely different, 
and on many occasions I have had a hand, as has many 
another woman who has been on the inside, in starting or 
in setting in motion the most important part of the machin- 
ery of the government of the United States. ^ 

Born and bred to a system that denied to a human being 
with one-sixteenth African blood in his or her veins the right 
even to testify in a white man's court, Walter Q. Gresham 
understood what the historian does not seem to com- 
prehend, that the negro who could not testify in a white 
man's court should not be permitted to sue a white man, 
much less a white woman, in a white man's court, and that 
freeing a slave did not elevate that slave to citizenship. 2 

The inherent evidence tends to confirm one of the rumors 
of those days, that the Dred Scott case was made up — 
made up by the Abolitionists. If so, it would not be the 
first time the same man or interest imposed on a court by. 
running both sides of a lawsuit without even the contending 
lawyers being on the inside. 

The most insidious species of flattery is to tell an old 
man his ipse dixit will settle a great controversy. Adopting 
the language of Justice Story in the Prigg case,-'' which had 
been so fruitful of agitation, old Justice Wayne said in his 
concurring opinion in the Dred Scott case: "The case 
involves private rights of value and constitutional princi- 
ples of the highest importance, about which there has 
come such a difference of opinion that the peace and har- 
mony of the country requires the settlement of them by 
judicial decision." However it may be viewed at this late 
day, I think all will agree that the decision in the Dred 
Scott case did not make for "peace and harmony." 

Well may the court have sidestepped, for the Union 

1 See Chapter XXV, pages 416-410. 

2 See Chapter XIX. 

3 See Chapter H, pages 42-44. 



94 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

Senator John Bell of Tennessee had objected in the Com- 
promise of 1850 that the question of slavery in the terri- 
tories was a political one and that no court was strong 
enough to decide it. But Congress, with the approval of 
every public man in the country, by the Compromise pro- 
vided that every question involving slavery in the terri- 
tories might go to the Supreme Court. 

Here was the opening the Abolitionist lawyer wanted. 
Should Associate Justice Benjamin R. Curtis stick to his 
early views and concur with the court that it was a pro- 
slavery Constitution, it would establish one of their premises 
to support their conclusion that the Union should be broken 
up. But they had overcome him by the "power of their 
intellect and the brilliance of their language." 

They believed that he would eat his own words that 
slavery was moral, agree with them it was immoral, and 
then endeavor to construe the pro-slavery Constitution as a 
free instrument. But whether or not he would influence 
any of his brethren was immaterial, for either course would 
help their plan of agitation to increase the bitterness of 
the sections, so that war might follow unless the so-called 
statesmen, as they said, should settle the controversy 
as statesmen should and as the English Abolitionists had 
forced the English statesmen to do. 

It was a kind, sweet, gentle woman, Elizabeth Herrick, 
an English Quakeress, who formulated the Abolitionist 
platform, "Unconditional and immediate abolition." 

Meantime, the Abolitionist organization, with Wendell 
Phillips at its head, was helping finance the anti-slavery 
immigrants, who were pouring into Kansas, and advising 
them to meet force with force. Phillips was no mere 
gabbler; he risked his life in the streets of Boston against 
armed officers of the law, both State and National. And 
he was a lawyer. Consider the uses he had made of the 
Prigg case. 

If the truth could be known, it was the Abolitionists 



THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES 95 

who "staked John Brown in the Harpers Ferry raid." 
PhilHps applauded it. He went to Europe and told the 
French, English, and Irish Abolitionists that for the first 
time in his life he was proud to be an American. I remem- 
ber the John Brown raid as if it had occurred but yesterday. 
From it Walter Q. Gresham turned in horror. 

And some of my historian critics will urge that the 
Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments had had nothing 
to do with slavery in the territories. They grew out of it. 
And when it is considered that after the surrender, with the 
South prostrate, it took these two Amendments to the 
Constitution of the United States to "reverse" the Dred 
Scott case, it must be conceded there was some ground 
for it. 

One night at Secretary of the Treasury John G. Carlisle's 
residence, during the last Cleveland administration, there 
was a discussion of New England men and measures. Mrs. 
Carlisle said: "Judge, you are harder on the Yankees than 
we are!" My husband had just said: "I can appreciate 
the relief it was to many of the New England statesmen 
when Wendell Phillips died, for E. R. Hoar said they all 
approved that last act of Phillips'." 

The conversation turned to Charles Sumner. My 
husband remarked: "General Grant never liked Sumner. 
Whatever you people may think of General Grant, he was 
sincere, though sometimes mistaken." It was said in 
General Grant's presence, "Charles Sumner does not be- 
lieve in the Bible." "No," replied the General, "he did 
not write it." 

In the first of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Senator 
Douglas charged Mr. Lincoln with being an Abolitionist 
and a Revolutionist, and proved it, as the pro-slavery man 
thought, by Mr. Lincoln's "House Divided against Itself" 
speech. For vSouthern consumption, — to separate Senator 
Douglas from his Southern friends, for that was Lincoln's 
asserted purpose — he demonstrated in the Alton debate 



96 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

that Senator Douglas was the best AboHtionist of them all.^ 
Wrongly decided, Mr. Lincoln said he would not obey 
the Dred Scott decision. But if correctly decided, he said 
there was no escape from its conclusion that it carried 
slavery into the territories, and that all the power of 
the National government should be exerted to protect the 
slaveholder in his slave property instead of leaving to 
the territorial legislature the measure of protection, if 
any, the slaveholder should receive after he reached the 
territory. 

George D. Prentice, in the Louisville Journal, seized on 

iln the Freeport speech, Senator Douglas said: 

"The next question propounded to me by Mr. Lincoln is: 'Can the people of a territory 
in any lawful way, against the wishes of any citizen of the United States, exclude slavery from 
their limits prior to the formation of a State Constitution?' I answer emphatically, as Mr 
Lincoln has heard me answer a hundred times from every stump in Illinois, that in my opinion 
the people of a territory can, by lawful means, exclude slavery from their limits prior to the 
formation of a State Constitution. Mr. Lincoln knew that I had answered that question over 
and over again. He heard me argue the Nebraska Bill on that principle all over the State in 
i8s4, in i8ss, and in 1856, and he has no excuse for pretending to be in doubt as to my position 
on that question. It matters not what way the Supreme Court may hereafter decide as to 
the abstract question 'whether slavery may or may not go into a territory under the Consti- 
tution,' — the people have the lawful means to introduce it or exclude it as they please, for the 
reason that slavery cannot exist a day or an hour anywhere unless supported by police regu- 
lations. These police regulations can only be established by the local legislature; and if the 
people are opposed to slavery, they will elect representatives to that body who will, by un- 
friendly legislation, effectually prevent the introduction of it into their midst. If, on the con- 
trary, they are for it, their legislation will favor its extension. Hence, no matter what the 
decision of the Supreme Court may be on the abstract question, still the right of the people to 
make Slave Territory or a Free Territory is perfect and complete under the Nebraska Bill." 

In the Alton debate, Mr. Lincoln said: 
"And if I believe that the right to hold a slave in a territory was equally fixed in the Con- 
stitution with the right to reclaim fugitives. I should be bound to give it the legislation neces- 
sary to support it. I say that no man can deny his obligation to give the necessary legislation 
to support slavery in a territory, who believes it is a constitutional right to have it there . . . 
I say if that Dred Scott decision is correct, then the right to hold slaves in a territory is equally 
a constitutional right with the right of a slaveholder to have his runaway returned. No one 
can show the distinction between them; the one is expressed so that we cannot deny it; the 
other is construed to be in the Constitution, so that he who believes the decision to be correct, 
believes in the right; and the man who argues that by unfriendly legislation, in spite of that 
constitutional right, slavery may be driven from the territories, cannot avoid furnishing an 
argument by which Abolitionists may deny the obligation to return fugitives, and claim the 
power to pass laws unfriendly to the right of the slaveholder to reclaim his fugitives. I do 
not know how much an argument may strike a popular assembly like this, but I defy anybody 
to go before a body of men whose minds are educated to estimate evidence and reasoning, and 
show that there is an iota of difference between the Constitutional right to reclaim a fugitive 
and the Constitutional right to hold a slave in a territory, provided the Dred Scott decision 
is correct. I defy any man to make an argument that will justify unfriendly legislation to 
deprive a slaveholder of his right to hold his slave in a territory, that will not immediately, 
in all its length, breadth, and thickness, furnish an argument for nullifying the fugitive slave 
law. Why, there is not such an Abolitionist in the nation us Dongtas after all!" 



THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES 97 

Mr. Lincoln's proposition that if the Dred Scott case was 
right, and "Squatter Sovereignty," or home rule in the 
territories, all wrong, to argue with the greatest force and 
the fiercest denunciation of all who questioned his conclu- 
sions, that every power of Congress and the executive should 
be exerted to protect the slaveholder who took his slaves to 
a territory. He separated John C. Breckenridge, then Vice- 
President of the United States, from the doctrine of Squat- 
ter sovereignty, and from Stephen A. Douglas. Prentice's 
views went like a shot to the Gulf.^ Many a time since 
the war have I heard the Southern women complain that 
'our worst Secessionists were Yankees." Not only that, 
but I can say that the hardest masters among the slave 
owners were New England men who settled in the South. 
Here I am simply reciting facts. 

I know how the agitation affected my father. He was 
not a bitter pro-slavery man in the beginning, as I have 
shown. Indeed, he wanted to get away from slavery. But 
the fury and assaults of the Abolitionists made him, as well 
as others, frantic. And with his keen Irish mind, he was 
alive to every phase of the question. 

As I have before stated, Walter Q. Gresham was not an 
Abolitionist. That innate consideration for others, more 
even than his education and environment, led him to a 
different course, and he was most considerate of my views 
and those of my father. He was then considerate in private, 
as well as in public, of what he said about the men and 
institutions of the South, irritated as he was at times at 
Southern arrogance. He did not then assail the Supreme 
Court. But he could and he did press the immorality of slav- 
ery in a way that did not make the pro-slavery men wild. 

To use one of Mr. Lincoln's own expressions in the 
Lincoln- Douglas debate, "The winnings were not all on one 
side." Under the pressure of Senator Douglas's assaults, 
Mr. Lincoln retreated farther than Walter Q. Gresham was 

1 See page 73. 



gS LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

willing to go even to save the Union. After Mr. Lincoln 
got the advice of the Czar of all the Russias, with the 
balance of Europe with England in the lead against him, 
as to the supreme importance of preserving the Union, he 
announced his willingness to make any concession to the 
pro-slavery people — that his sole purpose was to save 
the Union, and that too with or without slavery. This 
was not exactly consistent with his riding into pov/er on his 
avowed determination ultimately to abolish slavery because 
it was immoral, and his criticism of Douglas for stabbing 
the institution in the back by saying, "I care not whether 
slavery is voted up or voted down. I will leave it to the 
people." Possibly, had Douglas lived, his great devotion 
to the Union might have induced him to assent to the con- 
cessions Mr. Lincoln was willing to grant, but down to the 
last Douglas was insistent, the election of i860 being inter- 
preted as a "voting down," that it should be a finish fight- 
I know whereof I speak. Never was Walter Q. Gresham 
willing that should be done which Mr. Lincoln announced 
in his first inaugural address might be made "express and 
irrevocable" in the Constitution, because he said there was 
implied the right to own and hold a slave. Fair, open, and, 
as near as it can be, honorable war, not the John Brown 
kind, was what the pro-slavery men could have if they 
wanted more than the fathers had granted. Having shed 
his blood for the preservation of the Union, and incidentally 
for abolition of slavery, Walter Q. Gresham, according to 
many who were at a safe distance in the rear, was not a 
good Republican for desiring to welcome back to our body 
politic the brave men he had met on the battlefield, and 
intrusting to them, rather than to the inexperienced 
and half-civilized "Africans," the control of their local 
affairs.^ 

At Galesburg, in northern Illinois, Senator Douglas sep- 
arated the Abolitionists from Mr. Lincoln by telling them 

iSee pages 460 and 471. 



THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES 99 

that when he had him, Lincoln, down at Charleston, in 
southern Illinois, among the ex- Whigs and pro-slavery men 
from Virginia and Kentucky, he had forced him to commit 
himself as to just where he stood on the subject of the 
black man. Mr. Lincoln could not deny his own words; 

I will say, then, that I am not now nor ever have been in favor 
of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of 
the white and black races; that I am not now nor ever have been 
in favor of making voters of negroes, or jurors, nor of qualify- 
ing them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people. 
I will say in addition to this, that there is a physical difference 
between the white and black races, which, I believe, will for- 
ever forbid the two races living together upon terms of social and 
political equality; and inasmuch as they cannot so live, that while 
they do remain together, there must be the position of superior 
and inferior, and that I, as much as any other man, am in favor 
of the superior position being assigned to the white man.^ 

These are the words that, since reconstruction days, 
have been quoted by Southern men, with the acquiescence 
of the nation, in justification of the suppression of the negro 
vote in the South. At the time these words were uttered 
there was not a State in the Union that did not discriminate 
in its constitution and laws against the freedmen. Promptly 
asserting, in the remaining debates in northern Illinois, that 
the freedmen should be treated as human beings and ac- 
corded all the rights — among which he failed to mention the 

IThat Mr. Lincoln knew how to make concessions and still keep the edge of the sword 
against his opponent, the following language of the next paragraph of the Charleston speech 
attests: "I do not understand that because I do not want a negro woman for a slave, I must 
necessarily want her for a wife. . . . So it seems to me quite possible for us to get along 
without making either slaves or wives of negroes. I will add to this, I have never seen, to my 
knowledge, a man, woman, or child, who was in favor of producing a perfect equality, social 
and political, between negroes and white men." 

In his rejoinder in the Charleston debate Mr. Lincoln begins: "Judge Douglas has 
said to you that he has not been able to get from me an answer to the question whether I am 
in favor of negro citizenship. So far as I know, the Judge never asked me the question before. 
He shall have no occasion to ever ask it again, for I tell him very frankly that I am not in favor 
of negro citizenship. . . . Now, my opinion is that the different States have the power to 
make a negro a citizen, under the constitution of the United States, if they choose. The Dred 
Scott decision decides that they have not that power. If the State of Illinois had that power, 
I should be opposed to the exercise of it." 



lOO LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

ballot, and he never was for enfranchisement en masse — 
essential to the protection and enjoyment of their life, lib- 
erty, and property, Lincoln not only lost Abolitionist votes 
in northern Illinois in 1858, but the impression his "House 
Divided against Itself" speech produced on the pro-slavery 
men was not effaced for a long time. 

We understood the Dred Scott case, for, as I have 
said, while Winnie, our cook, was free in Indiana, when 
she returned with us to Louisville, Kentucky, as she did 
at certain intervals, her status as a slave was resumed, as 
the Supreme Court of Massachusetts had held in the Megs 
case. "Old Winn" preferred Kentucky to living under the 
reactionary Indiana constitution.^ The Illinois Black Laws 
were still on the statute books. And there was the Bran- 
denburg case.- 

To the last "Old Winn" was nw friend. "I will never 
leave until I cook your wedding breakfast." And a most 
bounteous one it was. She was the last to shower on me her 
blessings. "Good-bye, Mammy," I said as I embraced her. 

As we made the twenty-mile drive from Corydon to 
New Albany that crisp February morning, my young hus- 
band said his confidence increased that the promptings of 
the human heart would settle the slavery question. 

Every Southern court that passed on it, after the rati- 
fication of the Constitution of the United States, held that 
the voluntary taking of a slave to free territory manu- 
mitted that slave even in the slave territory from whence 
the slave had been taken. Louisiana, Kentucky, Missis- 
sippi, and Missouri so held. To quote the language of the 
Supreme Court of Louisiana (in Marie Louise vs. Moret, 
9 La. Rep. 475) in 1835 : "The benign and liberal effect of 
the laws of France is such, that Marie Louise being free there 

iMay 2, i860. Albert G. Porter, then a Republican representative in Congress, and later 
governor of Indiana, said, "It is not probable, Sir, with the prejudices of my early education, 
that I would be likely to have too great sympathy for negroes. In Indiana we have adopted 
a constitutional provision that no negro, whether he be bound or free, shall be allowed to come 
within its limits." 

2 See page 78. 



THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES loi 

one minute, it was not within the power of her former 
master to reduce her again to slavery in Louisiana." 

In 1820, the Court of Appeals of Kentucky, in the case 
of Rankin vs. Lydia,^ where it was claimed Lydia was free, 
and it was so held, because her master had taken her to 
the territory of Indiana, while not going as far as the Louis- 
iana court, declared as follows: "And is it to be seriously 
contended that as soon as he transported her to the Ken- 
tucky shore, the noxious atmosphere of this State, without 
any express law for the purpose, clamped upon her newly 
forged chains of slavery, after the old ones were destroyed? 
For the honor of our country, we cannot for a moment 
admit that the bare treading of our soil is thus dangerous 
to the degraded African." 

In 1827, in the celebrated Grace case, on appeal from 
the Vice Admiralty Court of Antigua, one of the British 
West Indies, Lord Stowell of the High Court of Admiralty, 
in a long but not logical or well-considered opinion, 
criticized, if he did not overrule. Lord Mansfield's opinion 
in the Sommerset case. In 1822, a Mrs. Allen, a British 
subject, residing in Antigua, went to England on a visit. 
She took with her as her maid one of her husband's slaves, 
named Grace. After a year's visit Grace returned volun- 
tarily with Mrs. Allen to Antigua. August 8, 1825, at the 
instance of one of the West India custom officers — Wykes — 
an action was brought in the Admiralty Court of Antigua 
to test the question of Grace's manumission because she 
had been in England. At that time a slave was so far a 
chattel or an animal that he or she could not maintain 
a suit in his or her own name in the West India colonial 
courts. The Antigua court held, that although free in 
England, Grace's status as a slave was resumed when she 
returned to Antigua, and the High Court of i\dmiralty 
affirmed that decree. 

Still, the Grace case did not "feaze" the Southern 

1 A. K Marshall 467. 



I02 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

courts, and not until the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, 
in 1837 in the Megs case,^ in an opinion by the venerable 
Lemuel C. Shaw, decided, in the face of the Louisiana deci- 
sion we have just quoted, that a Louisiana slave owner could 
bring his slave to Massachusetts for a temporary purpose 
and not thereby manumit that slave, and Justice vStory's 
unqualified endorsement of Lord Stowell's opinion in the 
Grace case, did the Southern courts abandon their humane 
and generous sentiments. Senator George F. Hoar in his 
memoirs places Justice Shaw at the head of the Massa- 
chusetts judiciary, and that seems to be the place accorded 
him by the bar of the nation. But neither as a law student 
nor as a judge did Walter Q. Gresham ever look on Justice 
Story, Justice Benjamin R. Curtis, or Chief Justice Shaw, 
as great jurists or statesmen, as Senator Hoar classes Chief 
Justice Shaw. The judgment of Chief Justice Shaw in the 
Megs case, and Justice Story's 'endorsement of the Grace 
case, really lie at the basis of the Dred Scott decision. 
The lawyer for the slave owner in the Megs case was Ben- 
jamin R. Curtis. It was the argument of Benjamin R. 
Curtis, that slavery was not immoral, that the Grace case 
had overruled the Sommerset case,- "that a citizen of 
Louisiana has a very different standing in our courts at 
this day from the standing of a Virginian in the Court of 
the King's Bench in 1772 just before the breaking out of 
the Revolutionary War," together with Justice Story's 
unqualified endorsement of the Grace case, that made 
the Megs case. 

In 1850,^ the Supreme Court of the United States — 
Justice Story still a member — affirmed the Court of Ap- 
peals of Kentucky in 1845,* i^i overruling the decision in the 
Lydia case and adopting the Megs case as a rule of property 
in Kentucky. The Mississippi court reversed itself. But 

1 Ames vs. Commonwealth 19 Pick 197. 

2 See Chapter II, page 36. 
3Strader vs. Graham 10 Howard 82. 
■IStrader vs. Graham 5 B. Monroe 173. 



THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES 103 

in Louisiana it took an act of the legislature to adopt the 
Megs case as a rule of property. 

A square decision of the Supreme Court of the United 
States upholding the Megs case would operate in the North 
as the Megs case had in New England. The Megs case had 
not only utterly confounded the conscience Whigs and the 
Free Soilers, but it had enabled Wendell Phillips to whip 
New England into a frenzy against "the Fugitive Slave 
bill lawyers and judges." 

There is much to sujoport the view asserted at the time, 
that it was the Abolitionists who conducted from the be- 
ginning to the end the litigation about the negro Dred 
Scott, especially after it got to the Federal courts. The 
final judgment of the Supreme Court of the United States, 
declaring Dred Scott to be Dr. F. A. Sanford's slave, was 
entered March 7, 1857. A few days later, Dr. Sanford 
executed and put on record a deed setting Scott free. 

"Boston has become a suburb of Alexandria, Mason 
and Dixon's line has been shoved up to the Canadian 
border, and the time will come when the slave trader will 
exhibit his marts at the foot of Bunker Hill Monument," 
said Phillips. Of course he did not believe it, but as a 
lawyer he knew how to argue his case and incidentally 
"lay on the lash." 

According to some accounts, Dred vScott was born a 
slave in Louisiana Territory before the purchase. By the 
treaty with Napoleon, the rights of the citizens of Louisiana 
to their property, which included slaves, were to be recog- 
nized and protected by the United States. Another account 
has it, he was brought to Missouri by his Virginia master. 
His owner, Dr. Emerson, a surgeon of the United States 
Army, removed him from Missouri to the United States 
military post at Rock Island, in the State of Illinois, and 
thence to the military post at Fort Snelling, now in the 
State of Minnesota, then a part of Upper Louisiana, and 
north of latitude 36° 30'. Section 8 of the Act of Congress 



104 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

of 1820, known as the Missouri Compromise, prohibited 
slavery north of the hne 36° 30'. At Fort SneUing, Dred 
Scott was permitted to marry Ehza, the slave of Major 
Talifero, and, to keep them together. Dr. Emerson pur- 
chased Eliza. Of this marriage two children were born, — 
Eliza, on board the steamboat Gipsy in the Mississippi 
River north of the Missouri line, and Lizzie, in the State 
of Missouri at the military post called Jefferson Barracks, 
where Dr. Emerson returned in 1838, bringing with him 
Dred Scott and the two Elizas. 

Dr. Emerson died in Davenport, Iowa, in 1844, leaving 
his property in trust to his wife for his daughter, and naming 
Mrs. Emerson's brother Dr. F. A. vSanford, as executor. 
The will was probated in Iowa. Sanford refused to qualify 
as executor, and Mrs. Emerson was appointed adminis- 
tratrix. 

In 1846 Mrs. Emerson returned to St. Louis. Mean- 
time, Dred Scott had continued in St. Louis practically 
free, but it was said he was lazy and good for nothing, and 
would not work. Frank P. Blair, Jr., was a Free Soiler, then 
practicing law in St. Louis, and his brother, Montgomery 
Blair, was one of the judges of the Common Pleas Court of 
St. Louis County. 

In December, 1846, Dred Scott and his wife began an 
action in the Circuit Court of St. Louis County against 
Irene Emerson, administratrix. His claim to freedom was 
based on Section 8 of the Missouri Compromise, and on the 
early decisions of the Supreme Court of Missouri, namely, 
that the taking by a master of his slave to free territory 
manumitted the slave, even though the slave voluntarily 
returned with the master to Missouri. Accordingly, the 
jury at the April, 1849, term, was instructed by the trial 
court to find for Scott. This they did, but the verdict 
was set aside and a new trial granted. On the second trial 
in January, 1850, before another judge, under peremptory 
instructions from the court, the jury returned another 



THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES 105 

verdict for Scott. This time judgment was entered on the 
verdict. On appeal, the Supreme Court of Missouri at the 
March term, 1852 (15 Mo. 516), reversed itself; that is, 
took back its early decision, followed the Massachusetts 
case and the late Kentucky case, and instructed the Circuit 
Court of St. Louis County to do what it promptly did — 
find Dred Scott was still a slave. 

Under normal conditions, after the judgment of the Su- 
preme Court of Missouri the litigation would have ended. 
In the Fall of 1850, Mrs. Emerson married Dr. Calvin C. 
Chaffee, a physician of Springfield, Massachusetts, an 
Abolitionist, and soon after a member of Congress from 
the Springfield district. After the decision of the Supreme 
Court of Missouri, Mrs. Chaffee sold Scott, his wife, and 
children to her brother Dr. F. A. Sanford, who had re- 
fused to qualify as executor of Dr. Emerson's estate, and 
who was then a citizen of New York. 

In 1853, Scott, claiming to be a free man, brought his 
action of trespass against Sanford in the Circuit Court of 
the United States for the District of Missouri. The juris- 
diction was predicated on the diverse citizenship, Scott of 
Missouri and vSanford of New York. Sanford pleaded that 
"Dred Scott is not a citizen of Missouri because he is a 
negro of African descent, whose ancestors were brought 
into this country and sold as slaves, and thus he cannot sue 
in the United States courts." That it was a made-up case 
is almost conclusive from the agreed statement of the case 
embodied in a written stipulation which was filed for the 
consideration of the court and jury. There was no need 
of a jury. All depended on the conclusions the court would 
draw from the agreed facts. After setting forth the facts 
as we have stated them, there was this stipulation, which 
as a matter of fact was not true, namely, that it was Dr. 
Emerson and not his widow, Irene Emerson Chaffee, who 
sold Scott, his wife, and children to Sanford. Under Dr. 
Emerson's will there was a question whether the widow. 



io6 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

Mrs. Chaffee, had the power to sell. The failure of some 
one to bring that question to the attention of the lower or 
upper Federal courts is conclusive that the same man or 
interest was running both sides of the lawsuit. There was 
a directed verdict and judgment for the defendant, and a 
writ of error to the Supreme Court of the United States. 

The case was argued in the Supreme Court by Mont- 
gomery Blair, then off of the Missouri bench, and George 
T. Curtis, for Scott, while Reverdy Johnson of Maryland 
and Senator Guyer of Missouri appeared for Sanford. I 
afterwards knew Reverdy Johnson well. George T. Curtis 
was a brother of Justice Curtis, and this relationship should 
have kept him out of the case. If the Abolitionists hired 
Mr. Curtis — and it must have been they, for Dred Scott 
was without means to do so — it was a mean trick to 
embarrass his brother on the bench. 

The court decided first, that a person of African descent 
whose parents had been brought into the United States 
and sold as slaves, could not be a citizen of the United 
States, and could not sue in the courts of the United States. 
Dissenting from this proposition. Justice Curtis said that, 
having decided it, there the courts should have stopped. 
Possibly they could have stopped at this point, and well, 
perhaps, it would have been had they done so and said to 
Congress and the people, "It is a political, not a judicial, 
question." But Congress, in the Compromise of 1850, 
although Senator John Bell of Tennessee had protested no 
court was strong enough to settle the controversy, had put 
the question of slaver}^ in the territories up to the Supreme 
Court, and John Marshall had set the precedent of decid- 
ing every question presented in a lawsuit on the record or 
orally on the argument. The last question Chief Justice 
Marshall decided was that he did not have jurisdiction. 
It was thus in Marbury vs. Madison, "The first milestone 
of the Constitution," in which a great constitutional ques- 
tion was decided. It was then that Thomas Jefferson became 



THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES 107 

SO enraged at the judicial power. After deciding that 
Jefferson as President had no right to withhold commis- 
sions President Adams had signed after his appointments 
had been confirmed by the Senate, Chief Justice Marshall 
decided the court was without jurisdiction, because, he 
said, the case, which was a petition for a mandamus com- 
manding Secretary of State James Madison to deliver the 
commissions, should have been filed in a lower court and 
brought to the Supreme Court by appeal instead of being 
filed in the first instance in the office of the clerk of the Su- 
preme Court. When it came to questions of Federal power, 
Taney never repudiated anything that Marshall said or did. 

On one proposition. Associate Justice Curtis concurred 
with the Chief Justice, namely, that a slave at that time 
could neither be a citizen of the United States nor sue in 
the courts of the United States. Then as the majority 
pointed out, it had not been in the power of the Romans 
by manumission to elevate the former slave, no matter 
what the color of his skin, to citizenship in the republic. 
The creation of a citizen was a political and not a judicial 
power. Over Justice Curtis's dissent, the court held that 
breathing the free air, first of Illinois and then of the terri- 
tory of Minnesota, did not make Dred Scott a free man 
when he voluntarily returned with his owner to Missouri. 
Section 8 of the Missouri Compromise, prohibiting slavery 
in the territory north of the line 36° 30', was unconstitu- 
tional because it violated the treaty of the Louisiana pur- 
chase and because the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution 
of the United States protected the owner in his property; 
and as the Constitution recognized a slave as property, it 
was beyond the power of Congress to put a limitation on 
the right of the owner to take a slave to a territory of the 
United States. 

Emphasizing this right of the owner to take his slave 
as any other property to a territory, but suggesting no 
power or means the government of the United States 



lo8 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

possessed of protecting and preserving that property after 
the territory was reached, the decision gave color to Senator 
Douglas's claim of Squatter or Popular Sovereignty or home 
rule, by holding that while the United States could acquire 
territory, it expressly held such territory could only be ac- 
quired with the object in view of making that territory into 
States, holding it in the meantime not as Great Britain 
had held her American colonies, but in a way that would 
qualify them to become States. It was the British crown 
that in the first instance forced slavery on the colonists. 

Much of the opinion might be exchanged for Wendell 
Phillips' argument in support of his proposition that the 
Constitution of the United States was a pro-slavery in- 
strument. Amendment, as provided by the Constitution 
of the United States, Chief Justice Taney suggested, was 
the remedy for these harsh and unjust rules embodied in 
the Constitution of the United States, that, as Phillips said, 
grew out of "the belief that existed at the time the Con- 
stitution was adopted that the African was a mere chattel, 
so recognized by the laws of the nation, to be bought and 
sold, and had no rights the white man was bound to re- 
spect."^ 

Not only did the Chief Justice and several of his con- 
curring brethren thus rub it into New England for her 
inconsistency, but there is also in the Chief Justice's opin- 
ion that trace of irony that the philosopher often reveals 
for the mere man of property. 

Following his long dissenting opinion, after a bitter 
correspondence with Chief Justice Taney, Justice Curtis 
resigned September i, 1857. For Justice Curtis the Aboli- 
tionists had only sneers, never a word of censure for Taney. 

With Mr. Lincoln's approval. Congress had put the 
question of slavery in the territories up to the court, and 
while the court did the best it could, it did not attempt 
to make a complete and final exposition of the question. 

lAbolitionist Hand Book. 



THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES 109 

Had Scott remained in the territory, a different question 
would have been presented. 

If in 1858 Mr. Lincoln, instead of assailing and, as 
some say, inflicting a blow on the court from which it 
has never recovered, had taken as his text, "Amend these 
harsh and unjust rules," condemned as they are by the 
public opinion of the world ^ as the Dred Scott opinion 
all but avowed — and by all the early Southern jurists, he 
would have occupied a position of vantage from which to 
assail the immorality of the institution, a position that 
would not have admitted of their "going out" on him, or 
asserting that he was a revolutionist and secessionist. 
"The Illinois Black Laws" and the reactionary constitution 
of Indiana of 1850 tended to support Mr. Lincoln's con- 
clusion, if he really believed it, that the nation was to 
become all Slave. On the other hand, there was much to 
support his suggestion that it would become all Free. In 
his younger days, when at the bar, Rodger B. Taney had 
defended the Maryland and Pennsylvania Quakers who 
operated the Underground Railroad between those States, 
and denounced slavery most bitterly. But if, as I have 
heard many men both North and South say, slavery had 
become so interwoven in the web and woof of our consti- 
tutional, social, and commercial life that nothing short of 
war could end it, then Mr. Lincoln must be accorded the 
credit for uttering the words that made the conflict of 
arms. The fight over, we still, as I have said before, had 
to amend; or as Walter Q. Gresham stated it, "The war 
legislated."^ But what was not true of many another man, 
Mr. Lincoln grew in the midst of the strife. Had he lived, 
I believe, as is now generally believed, that we would have 
escaped many of the mistakes of reconstruction. In that 
policy he would have had a firm supporter in Walter Q. 
Gresham, 

1 See page 471. 

8 



CHAPTER VII 
ELECTED TO INDIANA LEGISLATURE 



GRESHAM A DELEGATE TO REPUBLICAN STATE CONVEN- 
TION CONTEST BETWEEN LINCOLN AND DOUGLAS POLITI- 
CIANS DIVISION OF DEMOCRATIC PARTY CHARLESTON CON- 
VENTION DEBATE BETWEEN JEFFERSON DAVIS AND STEPHEN 

A. DOUGLAS NOMINATION OF DOUGLAS AT BALTIMORE 

NOMINATION OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN AT CHICAGO CONVEN- 
TION GRESHAM REPUBLICAN NOMINEE FOR LEGISLATURE 

DEFEATS HANCOCK LINCOLN ELECTED AS PRESIDENT. 

TN i860 it was Kansas and Nebraska again, with seces- 
-*- sion threatened and plainly foreshadowed. 

This year my husband was a delegate to the Indiana Re- 
publican State Convention that met February 22, and nom- 
inated Henry S. Lane for Governor as a representative of the 
old-line Whigs, and Oliver P. Morton, who had once been 
a Democrat, for lieutenant-governor, under an agreement 
that, in the event of success. Lane should become United 
States senator and Morton Governor. While the contest 
was on for first place, Mr. Morton claiming it as of right 
because he had been the party candidate for Governor in 
1856, my husband was a supporter of Mr. Lane. This 
convention elected my husband's friend, Judge William T. 
Otto, one of the delegates to the Republican National Con- 
vention that had been called to meet in Chicago. Walter 
Q. Gresham favored the nomination of Salmon P. Chase. 
I have since frequently heard Judge Otto tell how Caleb B. 
Smith imposed on Judge David Davis and Joseph Medill 
when the latter during the convention was pledging every- 
thing in sight to insure Mr. Lincoln's nomination. "Mr. 
Smith," Judge Otto said, "made Judge Davis believe that 



ELECTED TO INDIANA LEGISLATURE iii 

the Indiana delegation would go to Seward unless Smith 
was promised a place in the cabinet; when the truth was 
that none of us cared for vSmith, and after we got to Chicago 
and looked over the ground all were for Lincoln." That 
the pledge was made I have heard from Judge Davis's own 
lips. That it was kept, everybody knows, for Caleb B. 
Smith became the first Secretary of the Interior in Mr. 
Lincoln's cabinet. When the time came for Walter Q. 
Gresham to make pledges as to membership in his cabinet 
should he be nominated and elected, he refused to do so. 

My father and the Louisville Courier, the Secessionist 
organ, kept constantly before us the question of secession 
and what the pro-slavery people would do in the event of 
the election of Senator Douglas or an anti-slavery man. 
My father also brought us the views of the business men 
of Louisville, whose sympathies, possibly because of their 
trade being almost entirely with the South, were pro- 
slavery and Secessionist. As a matter of local pride, the 
business men of Louisville favored the nomination by the 
Democrats in i860 of one of their number, James Guthrie, 
who in addition to his other public services had been 
Secretary of the Treasury under President Fillmore. But 
he was a Union man at heart and had only the nominal 
support of the Courier. 

The Harney s were still for Senator Douglas. George 
D. Prentice, apparently without a candidate, had passed 
into the most dangerous of the two classes of disunionists 
that Henry Clay, in 1850, said threatened our country: 
One is that which is open and undisguised in favor of sepa- 
ration. The other is that which, disavowing a desire for 
the dissolution of the Union, adopts a cause and contends for 
measures and principles which must inevitably lead to that 
calamitous result." 

The Democratic party divided at Charleston, May 3, 
i860. When the convention met April 23, although the 
Douglas people were in a majority, the adjustment of the 



112 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

party machinery gave the pro-slavery element the control 
of the Convention, and in the committee on resolutions a 
majority of one. The differences were carried to the floor 
of the Convention, where the Douglas people, by a vote of 
165 to 138, substituted theirs — or the minority report of 
the Committee on Resolutions — for that of the majority, 
as the party platform. 

The pro-slavery people insisted on their theory that as 
slaves were recognized as property by the Federal con- 
stitution, and that as in the Dred Scott case it had been 
held a slave could be taken to a territory, therefore the leg- 
islative and executive branches of the Federal government 
should protect slavery in the territories. 

But the Douglas people concluded — and the Dred 
Scott case did not preclude the inference, for Scott had 
voluntarily returned with his master from Minnesota 
Territory to Missouri — that in organizing a territory as 
an embryonic State and vesting it with legislative power, 
the legislature in representing the wishes of its constituents 
was absolute and supreme in the control of the police 
power. 1 It is a doctrine supplemented by acts of Congress 
that is to-day giving the Prohibitionists bone-dry territory. 
But as it was then patent that without the aid of an effi- 
cient police force there could be no such thing as the actual 
enjoyment of slave property in a territory, the Douglas 
platform ended with this proviso, that inasmuch as differ- 
ences of opinion had arisen as to the nature and extent of 
the powers and duties of the Congress of the United States 
and the territorial governments under the Constitution, 
over the institution of slavery within the territories, they 
would abide by the decisions of the Supreme Court of the 
United States on these questions. 

Immediately upon the adoption of the Douglas plat- 
form, the delegates of Alabama, led by William L. Yancey 
— who had argued on the floor of the convention that 
"Squatter Sovereignty" was unconstitutional — all left the 

1 See pages 21 and 22; also page 471. The war did not destroy the States. 



ELECTED TO INDIANA LEGISLATURE 113 

convention, followed by the delegates from Mississippi, 
Louisiana, South Carolina, Florida, Texas, and Arkansas, 
to be followed the next day by the delegates from Georgia. 
President Buchanan and his officeholders were for anything 
"to beat" Douglas. There went with the seceders, Senator 
James A. Bayard, one of the delegates from Delaware, and 
William L. Whitney, then Collector of the Port of Boston 
and a delegate from Massachusetts. He was the father of 
William C. Whitney, afterwards Secretary of the Navy in 
Grover Cleveland's first cabinet, and one of the most influ- 
ential men in the second Cleveland administration, although 
not an official member of it, and an influential man in the 
Democratic Convention of 1896 at Chicago. The elder 
Whitney's experience at this time may have made the son 
conservative or timid. In 1896, William C. Whitney as 
the sound money leader and his sound money followers 
sat mute instead of bolting, as they subsequently did at the 
nomination of William Jennings Bryan. 

The seceders, after organizing as a convention and lis- 
tening to many fiery speeches, adjourned, without adopt- 
ing a platform or making a nomination, to meet in Rich- 
mond, Virginia, in June. 

Though the membership was thus reduced, still Senator 
Douglas could not be nominated. Some of the seceders 
remained and insisted that the two-thirds rule was still in 
force and that it meant two-thirds of 303, the original roll 
of the Convention, and it was so ordered by a vote of 141 
to 112, and then there was an adjournment, June 18. 

June 2 the Douglas people nominated Stephen A. Doug- 
las for President and Hurschell B. Johnson of Georgia for 
Vice-President. Seven days later the seceders nominated 
John C. Breckenridge of Kentucky for President and Joseph 
Law of Oregon for Vice-President. In the interim the 
Republican and Union National Conventions met, and 
there was a great debate between Jefferson Davis and 
Stephen A. Douglas in the Senate of the United States. 



114 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

March i, i860, Senator Jefferson Davis, with a view to 
anticipating the action of the Charleston Convention, had 
introduced a series of resokitions in the Senate of the United 
States setting forth the pro-slavery platform. But not 
until May 8 did he begin the discussion, in a speech that 
ran for several days, with interruptions. He attacked Sen- 
ator Douglas and Squatter Sovereignty in the Charleston 
platform; still he wanted to harmonize the conflicting 
elements and intimated that the seceders should be read- 
mitted at Baltimore. In the senatorial caucus that followed, 
all but two of the Democratic senators — Senator Douglas 
being absent — sided with Senator Davis and declared for 
his resolutions. May 15 and 16 Senator Douglas replied. 

On his side he quoted every Democrat living and dead 
except John C. Calhoun. Alone with Calhoun he classed 
the Senator from Mississippi. He said: "Secession is trea- 
son and treason means war. It is the plan of the seced- 
ers to break up the Union." In support of this assertion he 
read W. L. Yancey's letter of June 15, 1858, in which he 
proposed to break up the Union and form a Confederacy 
of the Cotton States. Then said Senator Douglas: "The 
seceders would not at first take in the border states^ . 
They would be left in the Union to make a shield against 
the Abolitionist and as a protection to the new Cotton 
Confederacy .... Not very flattering to my Virginia 
friends. And what will Kentucky do, with the Canadian 
line moved down to her borders, with no legal or moral 
obligation on the Abolitionists to return her runaway 
slaves?" He then paid a glowing tribute to the patriotism 
of Daniel Webster and Henry Clay, and warned Senator 
Davis that if he was attacked again he would reply; other- 
wise he would remain silent. 

The thought that held Kentucky in line when the test 
came was, What will be the effect on the Kentucky slave- 
holder in the event of the dissolution of the Union? 
Senator Douglas is entitled to the credit for first advancing 

1 See pages 124, 128, 130 and 131, 



ELECTED TO INDIANA LEGISLATURE 115 

it. My husband adopted it instanter and as a Republican 
used it with telhng effect in helping hold Kentucky in the 
Union. The women could see the point. Carrie Taylor 
Harney said, "Those fools in the Cotton States will lose us 
our niggers." 

In his "Lost Cause," Mr. Davis says little about this 
debate with Senator Douglas. It seems to have escaped 
the historians of the time, but it is most important because, 
aside from other considerations, it made every Douglas 
man a Union man, as was evidently Douglas's purpose. 

During that Davis-Douglas debate, the Louisville 
Democrat said: "The seceders want to get back to the Bal- 
timore Convention when it assembles, but we are opposed 
to admitting them. We are well rid of them. Those 
who applauded them climbing high will ridicule them com- 
ing down." 

Prentice argued in his paper that if it was lawful — and 
he said it was — for a territorial legislature, by nonaction, 
to deny protection to a slaveholder, then Congress should 
legislate directly to protect the slaveholder. ' ' Congress can- 
not force the territorial legislature to act, therefore Con^ 
gress must control the Squatters. It is wrong and immoral 
for Congress not to do so. No territorial legislature will 
make laws to protect slavery; Congress must make them. 
... If the legislature be unfriendly to slavery, then 
the Federal government must interfere and nullify such 
legislation." 

Harney answered ; ' ' This effort to render slavery so far 
national as to put any phase of it at the discretion of Con- 
gress is a work of political insanity in the South. 

"For our own part we wash our hands of this sectional 
movement. The Northern democracy have granted all we 
have a right to ask. They held back the Federal govern- 
ment, after a desperate struggle, from saying that the people 
of a territory should not have slavery if they wanted it. 
They will not say to the people of a territory, 'You shall 



Ii6 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

have slavery, however much you are opposed to it,' which 
is the whole substance of the majorities' resolutions. They 
ought not to say it and we ought not to ask them to 
say it." 

And as conclusive statement against the wisdom of 
secession, Major Harney said: "Kansas flaunts her anti- 
slavery code in your face and you cannot change it. Con- 
gress cannot change it, the President cannot change it. 
. . . New Mexico adopts her slave code and our Black 
Republicans won't dare to repeal it." 

Only on one occasion was there anything Hke bitterness 
in any of Mr. Gresham's discussions with my father, and 
that was when, in reply to an assertion of my father that the 
Republicans were inclined to be proscriptive of the foreign- 
born citizens, my husband said: "Most of the foreign-born 
citizens on arrival in this country join the party that is 
dominated by the slave power and is opposed to the rule of 
the people in the territories. If an Irishman or German 
cannot support the Republican policy with reference to the 
territories he certainly ought to support Senator Douglas. 
He is only insisting on what your father was driven out of 
Ireland for, demanding that the Irishman rule in Ireland. 
The Virginians are now justifying the existence of slavery in 
Virginia because they say the British government, against 
the wishes of the early colonists, foisted slavery and the 
slave trade upon them. What possible justification, then, 
can there now be for the Virginians and Kentuckians to 
insist that all the power of the Federal government shall 
be wielded in Kansas to make that territory a Slave State 
against the wishes of the settlers there?" 

While in Mr. Arthur's cabinet in 1883, in a discussion 
between my husband and Mr. Blaine about Stephen A. 
Douglas and his debates with Jefferson Davis in i860, 
Mr. Blaine said Douglas was the best debater America ever 
produced, but he had no wit. Speaking about Delaware 
at Charleston, Senator Douglas said: "Little Delaware is 



ELECTED TO INDIANA LEGISLATURE 117 

too small to divide, so Senator Bayard will come back." 
Not bad for a man devoid of wit! 

Mr. Gresham said what Mr. Blaine did not like: "We 
all soon came to Douglas's position on 'Squatter Sover- 
eignty.' Other men may have been the orators and the 
statesmen of the Union cause, but Douglas was its lawyer. 
From a constitutional and legal standpoint he justified the 
use of force to maintain the Union." 

I have visited many Union as well as Confederate sol- 
diers' homes. To me they all are saddening. The number 
of suicides among the veterans — the truth of which the au- 
thorities suppressed — was frightful. After talking them- 
selves out on the war, there is nothing to do but await the 
grim reaper. See that old fellow sitting alone glum and 
morose. Never was there a more pitiful object. Soon he 
anticipates Nature. One of the saddest of all places was 
Beauvoir, Jefferson Davis's last home, now a Confederate 
Mississippi Soldiers' Home. Nowhere was I ever more kind- 
ly treated and nowhere did my heart more go out in sym- 
pathy for the bronzed and grizzled veteran who fought 
so gallantly under such able leadership in the field. They 
all talked as though they knew my husband and they all 
remembered Douglas. One said to me, after I had remarked 
that war is a crime against civilization, "But Douglas took 
away our Constitution." "Yes," I replied, "and he said it 
was his Constitution." "But look how we suffered," he 
answered. "And think how I suffered," I said. "For 
over a year I had a wounded husband in bed. Think of 
the anxious days and the sleepless nights of the women, 
while you fellows were having a good time, and then tell 
me if you men should go to war over a constitutional ques- 
tion. A few speeches were made, drums were beat, and 
you were in line. And which side you were on, most of you 
say, whether 'Yank' or 'Reb,' all depended on which side 
of the Mason and Dixon line you were born." Not a 
sufficient reason at all for fighting but a most conclusive 
reason for getting together. 



ii8 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

Mississippi's prohibition in 1832 on the further importa- 
tion of slaves at least gives color to the statement of 
Jefferson Davis that he went out for a theory of govern- 
ment and not a principle of morals, and supports my 
conclusion that different management might have ended 
slavery without bloodshed. ^ Indeed, after the five presi- 
dential tickets were in the field in i860, Mr. Davis says he 
sought out Senator Douglas, and saying he was authorized 
to speak for Bell and Everett, as well as his own people, 
proposed an accommodation. But Douglas was implacable, 
and the "Black Republicans" in less than a year, as we 
have before remarked, adopted his Squatter Sovereignty. 
Of all the men of his time, Douglas alone was consistent 
from start to finish. 

Involved in Douglas's theory of government was the 
destruction of slavery. My Irish compatriot, the Confed- 
erate General Patrick R. Cleburne, saw it. The preserva- 
tion of the Union, "Pat" said, meant the destruction of 
slavery. That was the theory of Dennis Pennington, of 
Henry Clay, and of Walter Q. Gresham. "Let us beat 
them to it," argued General Cleburne to President Davis, 
"put the negro with him in our ranks, and with him fight- 
ing for his beloved South and his home, we will gain our 
independence." Read the letter of Robert Dale Owen to 
Secretary Chase of November 10, 1862, in which Mr. Owen 
urged on the National Government that if the negro 
remained loyal to the Confederacy the South would gain 
her independence.^ When too late the Confederate chief- 
tain adopted the Irishman's advice. 

The Union party, on May 19, at Baltimore, nominated 
John Bell of Tennessee for President and Edward Everett 
of Massachusetts for Vice-President, on a very brief plat- 
form, which simply declared that it recognized no political 
principles other than the Constitution of the country, the 
union of States, and the enforcement of laws. 

1 See page 254. 'See page 200; also page 464. 



ELECTED TO INDIANA LEGISLATURE 119 

George D. Prentice, whose extreme pro-slavery views in 
the Louisville Journal tended to impeach the good faith 
of the Bell and Everett movement, supported it with 
extraordinary sagacity. Although Breckenridge was then 
Vice-President and senator-elect from Kentucky, Prentice, 
with the support of patriots like John J. Crittenden, whose 
all was sacrificed, swung Kentucky to Bell and Everett. 
Breckenridge was attacked for having, as late as 1859, 
supported the Douglas doctrine of non-intervention in the 
territories, while "John Bell has always been against it." 
To catch the Democrats, Prentice told how John Bell had 
been reared in Andrew Jackson's school, and to get the 
Whigs he said that in 1850 Henry Clay had recommended 
Bell for a place in Fillmore's cabinet. 

While Senator Douglas was answering Jefferson Davis, 
the Republican party, May 16, at Chicago, was nominating 
Abraham Lincoln for President and Hannibal HamHn of 
Maine for Vice-President. 

The RepubHcan platform deprecated the centralization 
tendencies of the Buchanan administration and of the pro- 
slavery party; denied the right of secession and demanded 
the immediate admission of Kansas as a Free State under the 
free constitution which the people of Kansas had adopted. 
While it disclaimed any intention to attempt to interfere 
with the domestic institutions of the States, it claimed all 
the territory of the United States should be free, and said 
the Declaration of Independence should be adhered to as a 
means of interpreting the Constitution of the United States, 
and especially that clause of the Fifth Amendment, namely, 
that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property 
without due process of the law. ' ' It was under this identical 
clause of the Fifth Amendment that the slaveholder claimed 
protection for his property. 

Lincoln argued that the word "slave" was not used in 
the Federal Constitution to exclude the idea that there could 
be property in man, but Wendell Phillips told the slaveholder 



120 LIFE OF WALTER Q U I N T I N G RE SH AM 

that while the word "slave " was not in the Constitution there 
were other words that meant exactly the same thing. 

In July, i860, Walter Q. Gresham was nominated by 
the Republicans as their candidate in Harrison County for 
the lower branch of the legislature. His opponent, William 
Hancock, was a man of character and ability. They had 
joint discussions all over the county. All the legal, consti- 
tutional, and moral questions involved in the slavery ques- 
tion were discussed in every schoolhouse in the county. 
All the Davises, most of whom were Democrats, voted for 
him. They liked his morals and were satisfied with his 
pledges to support the Constitution and laws, a pledge made 
by every Republican speaker that year, but unfortunately 
there was doubt in the minds of many of the pro-slavery 
people as to the sincerity of these pledges. 

Many of the old-line Democrats from Virginia and Ken- 
tucky voted for my husband. A young Virginian, William 
N. Tracewell, afterwards an able and prominent lawyer, who 
remained a Democrat to his dying day, not only voted for 
him but was active in his interest. Gresham defeated 
Hancock by sixty votes, the vote being Gresham 1,797, 
Hancock 1,737. For Lane and Morton for governor and 
heutenant-governor, there were 1,691 votes; for Hendricks 
and Turpie, the Democratic candidates, 1,876. In the 
November election for presidential electors, the vote in 
Harrison County for Douglas and Johnson was 1,848; for 
Lincoln and Hamlin, 1,593; for Breckenridge and Lane, 
36; for Bell and Everett, 17. In the nation, of the pop- 
ular vote, Mr. Lincoln received 1,865,913; Mr. Douglas, 
1,374,664; Mr. Breckenridge, 848,404; Mr. Bell, 591,900. 



CHAPTER VIII 
UNION SPEECHES IN KENTUCKY 



SECESSION — GRESHAM MAKES UNION SPEECHES IN KEN- 
TUCKY — RESOLUTIONS DEPRECATING SECESSION OF SOUTH 
CAROLINA — HENRY CLAY's SPEECH IN DEBATE ON THE 

COMPROMISE OF 1850 USED BY GRESHAM CRITTENDEN's 

RESOLUTIONS IN SENATE FOR AMENDMENT OF CONSTITUTION 

TO SETTLE CONTROVERSY BETWEEN NORTH AND SOUTH 

GEORGE D. prentice's POSITION AND VIEWS AS EXPRESSED 
IN NEWSPAPER EDITORIALS KENTUCKY ADOPTS NEUTRAL- 
ITY AND STAYS IN UNION. 

T^OLLOWING the election, the excitement which' had 
•^ preceded it increased. When it became known that 
Mr. Lincoln was elected, the Federal officeholders in South 
Carolina resigned, her senators withdrew from Washington, 
and her legislature assembled and issued a call for a con- 
vention to meet at Columbia on the i8th of December. 

On the 1 6th of November, Governor Magoffin, who was 
an out-and-out Secessionist, in a letter to the editor of the 
Frankfort Yeoman, asked, "What will Kentucky do, and 
what ought she to do, now that Lincoln is elected Presi- 
dent?" "Secede," my father and the Secessionists prompt- 
ly answered. 

The great question at once was. What would the Border 
States — Missouri, Virginia, Maryland, and Kentucky — do? 
And most important of all, because it would be most prob- 
lematical, what would be the action of Kentucky? Doug- 
las men were for the Union ; most of the Breckenridge men 
were Secessionists. Kentucky's strategic position in the 
event of war was of great importance. Without her, the 
Confederacy could not succeed. 



122 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

Had Kentucky gone out solid it might have turned the 
tide. Not that Kentucky alone would have been such a 
predominating influence, although it would have been a 
very great one, but such action would have affected a large 
number of men in three other States. The 80,000 gallant 
soldiers Kentucky furnished to the armies of the Union, 
and they did not enlist, as we will presently show, until 
pledges were made by the National government that their 
slave property would be respected, added at the start to the 
80,000 Kentuckians who entered the Confederate Army, 
would have carried with them a large part of the men of 
southern Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois. Ridiculous as it may 
be, the board of commissioners of one of the southern Illinois 
counties passed an ordinance of secession. And it was a 
long time before John A. Logan cast his lot with the Union. 
Early in November, 1S60, at a Union meeting at Rockport, 
Spencer County, Indiana — and there were many such 
throughout .southern Indiana — the Secessionists took pos- 
session of the meeting and passed a resolution that if the 
Union must be dissolved, which they hoped would not 
happen, they wanted the dividing line north of the Ohio 
River. 

On the 17th of November, T. B. Farleigh and W. L. 
Coale, of the Brandenburg bar, submitted to the people of 
Meade and the adjoining counties a series of resolutions 
that were to be considered at a general public meeting to 
be held in the Meade County Court House in Brandenburg 
on the first Monday in the following December. They 
invited Judge Porter, Mr. Slaughter, and my husband to 
attend this meeting. "Tom" Farleigh, as he was called, 
was then as ever afterwards a devoted friend of my hus- 
band. After hostilities actually began he went into the 
Union Army as colonel of one of the Kentucky cavalry 
regiments. 

These resolutions deprecated the proposed action of 
South Carolina; asserted that no right to secede existed 



UNION SPEECHES IN KENTUCKY 123 

under the Federal constitution, but recognized the right 
of revolution as a legal right inhering in society; asserted 
a purpose to support the Union and that allegiance was to 
the whole Union and not to any party or section; declared 
that that was the position of Kentucky and the other Bor- 
der States, which were exposed to perils that did not be- 
set the Cotton States. "To our brethren of the North," 
the resolutions continued, "we would say the same, and 
more especially will we say, since several of their States 
have practically and substantially nullified the Fugitive 
Slave Law by State legislation, that we regard this action on 
their part as subversive of the Constitution, and we urge 
the repeal of all State legislation in derogation of the Fugi- 
tive Slave Law and a proper enforcement thereof." 

There was a large attendance from Meade County and 
good delegations from Hardin and Breckenridge counties. 
Olie C. Richardson, the man who helped settle the Branden- 
burg affair, a large slaveholder, presided. My husband 
was put forward as the speaker from the north side of the 
Ohio River, because he was a Republican and a member- 
elect of the Lidiana legislature. He liked to lead and never 
feared responsibility. 

The resolutions made it plain that the words and the 
teachings of Henry Clay had not been forgotten. 

They recalled the words of Mr. Clay in his reply to 
Senator Barnwell, Calhoun's colleague, in the debate on 
the Compromise of 1850, which Mr. Gresham quoted: 

The Honorable Senator speaks of Virginia being "my coun- 
try." The Union is my country ; the thirty States are my coun- 
try. She has created on my part obligations and feelings and 
duties toward her in my private character which nothing upon 
earth would induce me to forget or violate. But even if it were 
my own State, — if my own State lawlessly, contrary to her duty, 
should raise the standard of disunion against the residue of the 
Union — I would go against her. I would go against Kentucky 
in that contingency, much as I love her. 



124 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

Nor am I to be alarmed or dissuaded from any such course 
by intimations of spilling of blood. If blood be spilt, by whose 
fault is it to be spilt? It will be the fault of those who raise the 
standard of disunion and endeavor to prostrate this government; 
and, sir, when this is done, so long as it pleases God to give me 
voice to express my sentiments, or an arm, weak and enfeebled 
as it may be by age, that voice and that arm will be on the side 
of my country for the support of the general authority, and for 
the maintenance of the powers of this Union. 

Mr. President, I said nothing with respect to the character 
of Mr. Rhett. I know him personally, and have some respect 
for him. But if he pronounced the sentiment attributed to him 
of raising the standard of disunion and resisting the common 
government, whatever he has been, if he follows up that decla- 
ration by corresponding overt acts, he will be a traitor, and I 
hope he will meet the fate of a traitor.' 

After quoting Clay's words above, Mr. Gresham spoke 
as follows: 

The colony of Virginia, to her honor, had protested to the 
British king against sending slaves to her shores. She was the 
first State to abolish the slave trade. She had protested against 
the action of South Carolina and Massachusetts in engrafting 
into the national Constitution the twenty-year limit on the power 
of Congress to abolish the African slave-trade. Can she now sus- 
tain an administration that is proposing to fasten on the settlers 
of Kansas a system they do not want? If she does, her noble 
sons and their descendants who, with Thomas Jefferson as their 
guide, have made the great northwestern States what they are, 
will not follow her lead. Henry Clay had gone to death believ- 
ing he had dedicated Kansas and Nebraska to freedom. 

But however this may all be, what will be the position of 
the Kentucky slaveholder with the Canadian border moved down 
to the Ohio River and every man on its north bank an Abolition- 
ist? What aid then would South Carolina be to Kentucky? 
Better should she continue in peace and amity with her northern 
neighbors, many of whose citizens were, as I am, bound to her by 
ties of consanguinity as well as interest and friendship. 

1 See page 130. 



UNION SPEECHES IN KENTUCKY I2.«^ 

Myself, my associates, and my party arc plcdt^cd not to 
attempt to interfere with slavery in any of the States. 

The rights of the individual States will be sacredly respected. 
The Personal Liberty Laws of the Free States are all wrong and 
should be repealed. Indiana has none such on her statute books; 
and I believe I am safe in making the pledge that Indiana never 
will pass such laws — certainly not the legislature of that State, 
soon to assemble, of which I am a Republican member-elect.^ 

Mr. Gresham continued in a similar strain, pledging 
himself and his associates to support in good faith the 
provisions of the Constitution and Fugitive Slave Law, 
"however harsh some of its provisions seem to me." "But 
secession," he said, "is no remedy for any evil. The Union 
dismembered, all will be lost. Within the Union all differ- 
ences can be settled, all rights adjusted." 

Captain PhilHps said that this speech delighted the Ken- 
tuckians, and it was quoted far and wide as a sample of 
what the Republicans meant to do. 

During November and December, i860, these Union 
meetings were held all over Kentucky, and they were most 
fortunate and effective, for they prevented the slaveholder 
from being carried off his feet. They broke the Secession- 
ist wave. 

December 18, i860, Senator John J. Crittenden of Ken- 
tucky introduced a series of resolutions in the United States 
Senate looking to the amendment of the Constitution for 
the purpose, as his resolutions recited, of settling the con- 
troversy which had arisen between the Northern and 
Southern sections "of our once-united and happy country." 

Notwithstanding the presentation of Senator Critten- 
den's resolutions to the Congress of the United States, and 
the resolutions of many of her sister States to await a con- 
ference of the Slave States, two days later the South Caro- 
lina convention repealed the act ratifying the Constitution 
of the United States and passed an ordinance of secession; 
and in an address issued to the Cotton States gave as the 

1 See pages 130 and 131. 



126 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

principal reason for her action Mr. Lincoln's "House Di- 
vided against Itself" speech, asserting that the States must 
become "either all slave or all free." 

Acting under the general welfare clause, if African slavery 
in the Southern States be the evil their political combinations 
affirm it to be, the requisites of an inexorable logic must lead them 
to emancipation. If it is right to preclude or abolish slavery in 
a territory, why should it be allowed to remain in the States? 
According to the Supreme Court of the United States, it is no 
more unconstitutional in the territories than in the States. 

Then this complaint was made of the Personal Liberty 
laws and the Abolitionists: 

We affirm that these ends which the government has insti- 
tuted have been defeated and the government itself has been 
made destructive by them by the action of the non-slaveholding 
States. Those States have assumed the right of deciding upon 
the propriety of our domestic institutions, and have denied the 
rights of property estabHshed in fifteen of the States and recog- 
nized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the 
institution of slavery; they have permitted the open establish- 
ment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to dis- 
tiu-b the peace and purloin the property of the citizens of other 
States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our 
slaves to leave their homes; and those who remained have been 
incited by emissaries, books, and pictures to servile insurrection. 

Possibly if Lincoln had not made his "House Divided 
against Itself," speech, South Carolina would have found 
some other pretext to Hne him up with the Abolitionists. 

In a large measure a dead letter, except to arouse the 
pro-slavery people, the Personal Liberty Laws should have 
been repealed in every State. In his farewell address, Jan- 
uary 20, 1 86 1, in many respects admirable in tone, Jeffer- 
son Davis adverted to the Personal Liberty Laws of Massa- 
chusetts as a reason for following Mississippi. As a means 
of helping to hold the Border States Mr. Lincoln enforced 



UNION SPEECHES IN KENTUCKY 127 

the Fugitive Slave Law the first few months of his adminis- 
tration more effectively than his predecessor, James Bucha- 
nan, had done.^ 

But, in the meantime, the action of South Carolina 
in actually seceding, so far as a State could do so, and 
her address to the Slave States, infused new hope and life 
into the Kentucky Secessionists. December 27 Governor 
Magoffin issued a call for the Kentucky legislature to meet 
in special session January 17, 1861. 

What would be George D. Prentice's final position? 
This was the subject of the gravest concern to the Union 
leaders without as well as within Kentucky. Of Lin- 
coln's election Prentice had. said in his paper: "We have 
prayed fervently against the event and now we most sin- 
cerely deplore it." Mr. Prentice, as we have shown, had 
overshadowed all other forces in casting the electoral vote 
of Kentucky for Bell and Everett, although John C. Breck- 
enridge, the pro-slavery candidate, was a native of Ken- 
tucky and then a senator-elect from that State. The Bell 
and Everett vote was 66,016; the Breckenridge vote 
52,836; Douglas 25,644, and Lincoln 1,366. But all this 
time Prentice's heart was with South CaroHna, and in ad- 
vancing the Bell and Everett ticket he had gone beyond 
even the South Carolinians in advocating the claims of the 
slaveholder. He was not a mere scribbler but ' ' was equally 
forcible with knife and pistol as with pen." Had he then 
run up the Confederate flag, as he afterwards prepared to 
do, many of Kentucky's young men who subsequently 
enlisted in the Union Army would have gone into the Con- 
federacy, and most likely Kentucky herself would have 
"gone out." Prentice's son was one of the first to take up 
arms for the Confederacy. But Prentice's partners were 
Union men. And most fortunate was it that he was in- 
duced to take a waiting or neutral position. 

On his way to Indianapolis to attend the legislature, 
Walter Q. Gresham went to see Mr. Prentice, as he himself 

1 See page 139. 



128 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

said, to assure Prentice that Indiana would, under the con- 
trol of the Republicans, faithfully obey all her constitu- 
tional obligations to her Kentucky sister. On the 7th of 
January, 1861, my husband wrote me from Indianapolis: 
"I was with Mr. Prentice a few hours yesterday evening 
at Louisville. He talks all right; says he believes Mr. 
Lincoln is an honest, good man, wise and conservative." 

In an editorial in the Louisville Journal the next morn- 
ing, Mr. Prentice said: "South Carolina, without consid- 
eration, has jumped out of the Union; let Kentucky con- 
sider well where she would land before she jumps. . . . 
vSouth Carohna is in a different position than Kentucky. 
She has no neighbors, as Kentucky has, unfriendly to her 
domestic institutions, who would be free from all moral 
and legal obhgations to return her runaway slaves after 
she, Kentucky, went out of the Union."' 

When the Kentucky legislature met on the 17 th of 
January, instead of calling a convention as the Governor 
desired, it adopted neutrality as the pohcy of the State, 
and adjourned within thirty days with an appeal "to the 
southern brother to stay the hand of secession," but it 
protested against the general government using force to 
coerce the seceding States. 

Equivocal as these resolutions were, they left Kentucky 
in the Union. 



1 See page 114. 



CHAPTER IX 
INDIANA PREPARES FOR WAR 



FIRST SESSION OF INDIANA LEGISLATURE RESOLUTIONS 

ON THE STATE AND THE UNION GRESHAM REPRESENTS 

THE "traitor" HEFFRON IN KENTUCKY COURTS PEACE 

CONFERENCE WENDELL PHILLIPS'S SPEECH ABOLITIONISTS 

WOULD NOT COMPROMISE GRESHAM CHAIRMAN MILITARY 

COMMITTEE OF THE HOUSE, AND COLONEL ON GOVERNOR'S 

STAFF CRITTENDEN RESOLUTIONS GRESHAM's BREACH 

WITH GOVERNOR MORTON SPECIAL SESSION OF INDIANA 

LEGISLATURE GRESHAM PUTS THROUGH BILL VESTING 

APPOINTMENT OF FIELD AND LINE OFFICERS OF REGIMENTS 
IN HANDS OF GOVERNOR. 

WHEN the Indiana legislature assembled on the loth 
of January, Horace Heffron, the Democratic member 
from Harrison and Washington counties, who was the 
Democratic caucus candidate for speaker, attempted, as 
the House organized, to have it adopt a resolution that 
no man should be elected speaker, or to any other office 
under the legislature, who was not in favor of amending 
the Constitution of the United States on the line of the 
Crittenden Resolutions. 

The great work of that legislature was to place Indiana 
right on the question of secession, and so to amend or 
revise the military law of the State as to enable it properly 
to support the National government. A large number of 
the members of both the House and Senate introduced 
resolutions on "the State and the Union." As a sample 
of what they were, I offer the following, which Walter Q. 
Gresham introduced the second day of the session, the 

129 



I30 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

day before Henry S. Lane was inaugurated Governor of 
Indiana and Oliver P. Morton Lieutenant-Governor. In a 
few days Mr. Lane was elected to the United States Sen- 
ate and Mr. Morton became Governor. A copy of the 
resolutions, together with the speech in their support, was 
sent to George D. Prentice. Both Lane and Morton re- 
garded Prentice's attitude as of the greatest importance and 
were much interested in the conference Walter Q. Gresham 
had had with him only six days before. The resolutions 
read: 

Resolved: That the people of this State still retain their 
affection for the Union inherited from the generation of men 
who achieved our liberties in the great struggle for independence, 
and secured them in that sacred instrument, the Constitution, 
in which justice is established, domestic tranquillity is insured, 
and the common defense and general welfare are provided for; 
and they regard its perpetuation as the only safe guaranty for the 
continuance of the wonderful prosperity and happiness which have 
led us to our present high position amongst the great powers of 
the earth ; and they deny the right of any member of this confed- 
eracy to repudiate the Constitution made by all the people of the 
States, by seceding from the Union, and thereby disturbing the 
harmony and periling the happiness of the whole. 

2 . That while we will not deny to any State a right guaran- 
teed by the Constitution, we insist that the authority of the 
general government shall be maintained and the Constitutional 
laws of Congress impartially enforced in all the States and Terri- 
tories; and that the armed resistance to the execution thereof, on the 
part of the citizens of any State, is treason. 

3. That the people of Indiana are opposed to any interfer- 
ence by the Government of people of our State with the domestic 
institutions of another; that they ever have and always will main- 
tain the same respect for the rights of other States which they 
zealously exact for their own ; that they will scrupulously discharge 
all their constitutional obligations toward sister States, and they 
demand a like observance of the same from the other States of the 
Union. 



INDIANA PREPARES FOR WAR 131 

4. That if any State of this Union has enactments on its 
statute books in conflict with the provisions of the Federal Con- 
stitution, or any of the laws of Congress passed in pursuance 
thereof, it is the duty of such State to repeal the same. 

5. That it is the duty of the Federal government, and of the 
several States, to secure to the citizens of each State all the privi- 
leges and immunities of the citizens of the several States as guar- 
anteed in the Constitution, and a failure to discharge this obli- 
gation will destroy that harmony and paternal feeling which lie 
at the foundation of our free institutions. 

6. That the conduct of these patriotic men, who in the 
midst of the tide of disunion which is sweeping over a portion of 
our once happy country, still retain their affection for the Union 
and are bravely battling for the preservation of the authority 
of the general government, excites our earnest sympathies and 
challenges our admiration. 

7. That in view of the fact that a portion of the citizens of 
some of the States of the Union are in open, armed rebellion 
against the power and authority and threaten the overthrow of 
the general government, we hereby pledge, whenever necessary 
and demanded, in strict subordination to the civil authority, for 
the maintenance of the Constitution and laws of the general 
government, the entire power and resources of the State of 
Indiana. 

These resolutions, with all others, went to the Com- 
mittee on Federal Relations. They emerged as a report 
which omitted the word "treason." Men who claimed that 
the Personal Liberty Laws were right were afraid to use 
the word "treason." Walter Q. Gresham had used that 
word south of the river; he could use it north of the river. 
These resolutions as finally adopted pledged all the power 
of the State of Indiana to preserve the only government on 
earth wherein the rights of man constituted the foundation 
of its laws and the measure of its civil authority, and they 
deprecated any purpose to interfere with the right of each 
State to regulate its own domestic affairs. 



132 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

The minority report proposed the Crittenden Resolu- 
tions instead, as a basis for settling the difference between 
the North and South. It also deprecated the use of force 
to coerce the Secessionists back into the Union. 

While these reports were pending under debate, on the 
19th of January the legislature of Virginia, by telegraph, 
issued an invitation to all the States to send delegates to a 
conference to meet in the city of Washington on February 4, 
1 86 1, to discuss the proposed amendments to the Con- 
stitution that might settle the differences which then exist- 
ed on the slavery question. It suggested the Crittenden 
Resolutions as a basis of settlement, with Crittenden's first 
proposition so changed as to provide that slavery should be 
recognized not only in the present but in all future acquired 
territory south of the line 36° 30'. The discussion of the 
resolutions — they were discussed throughout the country 
and in every State legislature that met that winter — largely 
contributed to postpone the actual conflict until after Mr. 
Lincoln's inauguration. In 1858 Davis had told the Mis- 
sissippians that if it came to a finish fight, the South could 
not win. 

The Crittenden Resolutions were to be the Thirteenth 
Amendment to the Constitution, and, if adopted, never to 
be changed. They proposed: To renew the Missouri Com- 
promise line 36° 30'; prohibit slavery north and permit it 
south of that line; admit new States with or without slavery, 
as their constitutions might provide; prohibit Congress 
from abolishing slavery in the States, and in the District 
of Columbia so long as it existed in Virginia or Maryland; 
permit free transmission of slaves by land or water in any 
State; make the State and the county or municipality 
responsible to the owner of the fugitive slaves rescued after 
arrest, with the right to the State or municipality to re- 
cover from the rescuing parties; repeal the inequality of 
commissioners' fees in the Fugitive Slave Act; and ask 
the repeal of the Personal Liberty Laws of the Northern 



INDIANA PREPARES FOR WAR 133 

States, passed in derogation of the Fugitive Slave Act. 

In the course of the debate in the Indiana legislature, 
Horace HefTron and G. O. Moody got into a controversy 
that led to Hefifron sending Moody a challenge. Their sec- 
onds settled their difTerences, greatly to their satisfaction, 
it was said, after they reached the field of honor. But 
strange as it may seem, and as it was thought at the time, 
seconds as well as principals were indicted by the Kenton 
County Grand Jury for coming into Kentucky to fight a 
duel. And thus it was that Walter Q. Gresham never met 
Abraham Lincoln. For while Mr. Lincoln, on his way to 
Washington to be inaugurated, was in Indianapolis stopping 
at the Bates House, where my husband lived, the latter was 
in the Kentucky courts representing the "traitor," Horace 
HefTron. He not only got Heffron off but all the others. 

As the result of the debate, the minority or Heffron 
report was rejected and the majority report adopted. The 
proposition of John H. Stotsenburgh of Floyd County to 
have a special election as to whether Indiana would accept 
the Crittenden Amendment as a basis of compromise was 
voted down, and then Indiana, most of the Democrats 
concurring, responded to the invitation of Virginia by 
authorizing Governor Morton to appoint five delegates to 
the Peace Conference. 

Governor Morton appointed as one of the delegates 
Thomas C. Slaughter, my husband's former partner and 
his best friend. Mr. Gresham told Mr. Slaughter that it 
was agreed at Indianapolis that the delegates from Indiana 
to the Peace Conference should oppose the first provision 
of the Crittenden Resolution; that is, the one recognizing 
slavery south of the line 36° 30' as a basis for adjustment; 
instead they should offer popular sovereignty south of that 
line, and any pledge the pro-slavery people desired that 
the anti-slavery people would live up to the Constitution 
as the fathers had written it. "For one," my husband 
said, "and I know the sentiment of the young men, we will 



134 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

never consent to a Thirteenth or any other amendment to 
the Constitution, giving the slaveholder a stronger claim 
than he has now. Rather than that, we will fight. The 
fathers expected slavery to be abolished long before this. 
You are enough of a diplomat to avoid saying what will 
irritate." The record of that Peace Conference shows how 
Mr. Slaughter performed his duty. 

The Peace Conference met February 4 and was in ses- 
sion until the 28th. It was composed of many eminent 
men. Ex-President Tyler of Virginia was one of its mem- 
bers and was made its presiding officer. James Guthrie 
was one of the Kentucky delegates. 

In lieu of Mr. Crittenden's proposition, that all the ter- 
ritory south of the line 36° 30' should be recognized as slave 
territory, the Conference adopted popular sovereignty for 
that territory, but with conditions which the pro-slavery 
men said simply gave them the right to have a lawsuit 
after thc}^ took their slaves into the territory south of the 
36° 30' line. Still a majority of the pro-slavery men accept- 
ed or "swallowed" the report, and Kentucky, led by James 
Guthrie, favored peace on any terms. Senator Crittenden, 
who was patriotic to the core, said he would favor it or 
any other proposition that could be agreed on for the pur- 
pose of saving the Union. 

At this time there might have been an adjustment but 
for the Abolitionists. 

The ' ' Grape Vine ' ' from Montgomery was bringing the 
news that Jefferson Davis did not want the issue to go to 
war. At this time he could not sleep at night, so his wife 
tells us. His farewell address in the Senate of the United 
States, tinctured with sadness, did not preclude his return, 
and in his inaugural address to the Provisional Congress of 
the Confederate States of America, he deprecated war, and 
held out the hand of reconciliation. As before mentioned, 
when the test came, Jefferson Davis would not, or at least 
did not, order Beauregard to fire the shot at the flag at 



INDIANA PREPARES FOR WAR 135 

Sumter that precluded the possibility of a peaceable settle- 
ment. The overtures of the president of the Provisional 
Congress of the Confederate States of America were an- 
swered by Mr. Seward and Mr. Lincoln by the proposition 
to amend the Constitution of the United States so as to pro- 
vide that slavery should never be disturbed in the States 
where it existed except by unanimous consent. Before 
this the announcement had gone forth that Seward would 
be Secretary of State. 

Then it was, on February 17, 1861, that Wendell Phillips 
^poke : 

Seward will swear to obey the Constitution of the United 
States, but will not keep his oath. 

Bankrupt South Carolina, with 100,000 more slaves than 
whites within her borders, throws down her gauntlet at the feet 
of 25,000,000 people in defense of an idea which she thinks is 
right. I would that New England had one State among her six 
so brave. 

Union or no Union, Constitution or no Constitution, freedom 
for every man between the oceans and from the frozen pole to 
the hot gulf. You may as well attempt to dam up the Niagara 
with bullrushes as try to bind our anti-slavery purpose with a 
congressional compromise. The South knows it. 

But let the world distinctly understand why the slaveholding 
States leave the Union — to save slavery! and why we rejoice at 
their departure — because we know their declaration of independ- 
ence is the jubilee of the slave. 

Thirty years devoted to earnest use of moral means show how 
sincere is our wish that this question should have a peaceful 
solution. If your idols — your Websters, Clays, Calhouns, Scw- 
ards, Adamses — had done their duty, so it would have been. 
Not ours the guilt of this storm, or of the future, however bloody. 
But I hesitate not to say that I prefer an insurrection which frees 
the slaves in ten years to slavery for a century. A slave I pity. 
A rebellious slave I respect. 

Inciting the slaves to insurrection was a scheme from 
which I have shown my husband revolted in horror. 



136 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

At this time Mr. Gresham told Senator-elect Lane and 
Governor Morton that he would not fight in a servile or 
domestic war. "Rather than that," he wrote me from Indi- 
anapohs at that time, "the sooner the North and South 
have a peaceable separation the better." In this he was 
supported by many of the younger element. This ultima- 
tum of the younger men, among whom Walter Q. Gresham 
was the leader, was the only basis Ohver P. Morton ever 
had for making the charge, as he afterwards did, that 
Mr. Gresham was disloyal. If a consideration for the 
whites whose misfortune it was to be linked with the bonds- 
men was disloyalty, then Walter Q. Gresham was always 
disloyal. And never was Mr. Gresham loyal to the Re- 
publican organization on the proposition — quoting Mr. 
Lincoln's own words — "To make slavery express and 
irrevocable." To save the Union he would not make that 
concession, but he would give his life's blood for it. 

Then it was that the line-up became sectional. In the 
last days of February and the first days of March, 1861, 
the Republicans organized the territories of Colorado, 
Dakota, and Nebraska, in each instance — as has already 
been noted — copying the Kansas-Nebraska Act verbatim; 
certainly not, as Mr. Blaine says, to placate the Seces- 
sionists. 

The most important measure before the Indiana legis- 
lature was the Gresham Military Bill. On the organization 
of the House, Mr. Gresham had been made chairman of 
the Military Committee and had been given by Governor 
Lane a commission as colonel on the Governor's staff. Un- 
der the existing law the military officers of the State were 
elected by the men. It was manifest the officers should be 
appointed by the Governor. This view Walter O. Gresham 
early adopted and adhered to, although he had incurred the 
enmity of Governor Morton and had given up his com- 
mission as colonel on the Governor's staff. The opposition 
to the Gresham Military Bill was based on its centralizing 



INDIANA PREPARES FOR WAR 137 

effect. It was finally passed through the House on one of 
the last days of the session. After the vote had been .taken, 
Representative John H. Stotsenburgh proposed to amend 
the title by substituting these words: "An Act Making 
Provision for the Complete Rout of the Republican Party 
at the Next and All Succeeding Popular Elections." He 
was ruled out of order. But the bill failed to become a 
law, as it did not pass the Senate. 

In 1 86 1, J. F. D. Lanier, one of the country's ablest 
financiers, and his partner, R. H. Winslow, under the firm 
name, Winslow, Lanier & Company of New York, were 
reorganizing the Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne, & Chicago Rail- 
road Company. Mr. Lanier had settled at Madison, Ind- 
iana, at an early day, and before going into business in 
New York had been the president of the Madison Branch 
of the Indiana State Bank. At Mr. Lanier's instance, and 
also to please his friend, Samuel Patterson of Jeffersonville, 
a large owner in the Jeffersonville, Madison & Indianapolis 
Railroad, Walter Q. Gresham helped pass the legislation 
providing for the reorganization of the insolvent railroad 
corporations of the State. These acts were drawn in New 
York by vSamuel J. Tilden, and the construction they sub- 
sequently received at the hands of the United States Supreme 
Court will be interesting. 

In the debate on the bill to abolish the State printer, 
Walter Q. Gresham said: "When the gentleman from 
La Porte comes in here and endorses the sentiment, that 
'to the victor belongs the spoils,' he endorses a doctrine 
that I cannot endorse." 

At the election of the trustees who were clothed with 
the management and government of the benevolent insti- 
tutions of the State — they then were elected by the 
members of the two houses in joint session — Mr. Gresham 
voted against his party; that is, he voted to retain the 
existing board, although it was Democratic in politics. A 
difference of temperament, together with these acts, started 



138 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

a breach with Governor Morton that had become wide by 
the time the session ended. 

Limited as the regular session of the Indiana legislature 
was to sixty days, my husband was home by the middle 
of March, although he had remained in Indianapolis a few 
days after the legislature adjourned, to look after some 
cases in the State Supreme Court and in the Federal courts, 
and also to consider an advantageous proposition to form a 
partnership for the practice of law in Indianapolis which 
had been offered him by David Macy. But for the events 
that followed, the law partnership would have been formed 
and we would have removed to Indianapolis. He told me 
that his relations with Governor Morton, w^hich had been 
cordial and friendly at the beginning, had become strained 
and bitter, and that as a result he had given up his com- 
mission as a colonel on the Governor's staff. This was 
most agreeable news to me, for if there was to be war, I 
felt he would not be in it. But when Sumter was fired on, 
my fears came back. I knew what it meant. Wendell 
Phillips was the first man to mount a dry goods box in the 
streets of Boston and declare that the Union he had for 
years labored to dissolve must be preserved. 

Mr. Lincoln early got in touch with the Kentucky Union 
leaders. And the tenderness and coddling he showered on 
them all during the Spring and the dog days of 1861 is in 
strong contrast to the part he took in 1858, in "goading the 
slaveholder to madness," — although he did not put it in 
these exact words ^ as part of his plan to separate Doug- 
las from the Southern Democrats or, per se, the slave- 
holder. I am not saying this in criticism of Mr. Lincoln, 
but am simply recording the fact that he was big enough to 
throw consistency to the winds, and turn tail on his most 
cherished and lofty sentiments. He became a Union man 
per se — determined to save the Union with or without 
slavery. That he was sincere, the people farther south and 
in Virginia became convinced when it was too late. 



INDIANA PREPARES FOR WAR 139 

Against the charge that their position was insincere 
and illogical, the Union leaders in Kentucky claimed they 
certainly saved Kentucky as a State to the Union, and that 
the pledges they made to the Kentucky slaveholders, with 
Mr. Lincoln's consent, were in good faith, although they 
were not kept. The compensation that was subsequently 
offered by the government to the Kentuckians was utterly 
inadequate. And before the war was over, many of the 
good Union men of i860, 1861, and 1862 were in sympathy 
with the Confederate government. 

In his inaugural address Mr. Lincoln modified his anti- 
slavery views. He said that he was willing that what was 
implied in the Constitution of the United States should by 
amendment be made express and irrevocable: namely, "the 
right of one man to hold another to service" or slavery. 

These words were very different from the language of 
the Republican platform to which Lincoln had referred 
George D. Prentice the year before, when Mr. Prentice 
urged him to give voice to his conservative sentiments. 
They had a powerful influence in Kentucky. But more 
potent than his words were Mr. Lincoln's acts in actually 
enforcing the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. And never was 
the wisdom of Henry Clay and Daniel Webster in drafting 
and passing "that infamous law that made man the catcher 
of his fellow man'' better attested than in those trying 
da^^s when patriotic men were holding the Border States 
to the Union. ^ 

J. Russell Jones, one of "the Galena gang" and one of 
Mr. Lincoln's "boys," was one of Lincoln's first appoint- 
ees. Before he left Springfield Mr. Lincoln said, "Jones, 
I will appoint you United States marshal, and the first 
thing I want you to do is to return those three fugitive 
slaves now held in the Cook County jail in Chicago for 
safe keeping, pending their return under an order of Judge 
Drummond, to their owners, citizens of Missouri. Every 
attempt Buchanan's marshals have made of late to return 

1 See pages 54 and 55. 



140 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

a fugitive has failed. I want to show them at the carhest 
moment we will enforce the law." 

It was the popular belief that the Buchanan marshals 
had connived at rescues. 

"I think I was the first man Mr. Lincoln appointed in 
Illinois," said Mr. Jones, "and my first official act was to 
remove those three fugitives to Missouri. I made my ar- 
rangements for a special train from Chicago to run through 
the large towns without stopping, and for a ferry boat to 
meet it immediately on arriving at East St. Louis. Judge 
Drummond gave us a clearance, and before the Abolition- 
ists knew about it, I had delivered the three slaves to their 
owners in St. Louis. All of w^hich was duly chronicled in 
the newspapers." 

It was acts and words of Mr. Lincoln's like these that 
contributed to the election of, if they did not elect, at the 
special election in Kentucky on the 20th of June, nine 
Union members headed by Ex-Senator John J. Crittenden, 
to one State's Right or Secessionist, to the special session of 
Congress that Mr. Lincoln had called to meet July 4, 1861. 

April 24, 1 86 1, the Indiana legislature met in special 
session. Governor Morton had promptly filled Indiana's 
quota of troops to meet Lincoln's call for 75,000 men, issued 
after the fall of Fort Sumter. The most important work 
for Indiana was a new military law. 

The first letter I received after the Indiana legislature 
assembled is as follows: 

Indianapolis, Ind., April 25, 1861. 

We organized yesterday, ignoring party. The Democrats, with- ' 
out a single exception, are for the government and war. You 
can have no idea of the state of feeling in Indiana. Military 
companies are coming in almost every hour, and being sent back 
home, the call being full. We could raise 50,000 soldiers in thirty 
days in Indiana alone. 

The Anderson Guards arrived last night and went into camp 
this morning. They were not here in time to get into the service 



INDIANA PREPARES FOR WAR 141 

of our state, and are stationed here as a reserve guard. They are 
greatly admired. All or nearly all are large, stout men, and well 
behaved. Capt. Judson will make his inark as a military man. 

The South has reckoned without her host in this hellish design 
of breaking up the Union. They never dreamt that the people 
would rise up as one man to put down the rebellion. The Rebels 
must now come to terms or meet the vengeance of an outraged 
people. There can be no doubt about the final result. God is 
with the just. 

We will be here but a short time, perhaps a week. Horace 
Heffron, our Democratic friend from Harrison and Washington, 
proposed Cyrus Allen, the Republican speaker at the last session, 
and he was unanimously elected. 

A few days later, I received the following: 

Indianapolis, April 28, 1861. 

This city is still crowded with people. There are now some 
10,000 soldiers here, to say nothing of the immense throng of 
visitors, and in all that vast throng, there is but one sentiment — 
the government must be sustained. Republicans and Democrats 
are a unit on this question. You may think this might have 
been avoided, that war ought not to curse this happy land, but 
then you must '00k at the question in all its bearings. It is better 
to have war for one year than anarchy and revolution for fifty 
years. If the government should suffer the Rebels to go on with 
their work with impunity, there would be no end to it and in a 
short time we would be without any law or order. We must now 
teach the Secessionists a lesson. They must be made to know 
that they cannot attack the government without suffering for their 
rebellion. It is all bosh and nonsense to talk about the North 
making war on the South. The South rebelled against the laws 
and makes war on the government. I was talking this evening 
with a very sensible gentleman who has just been run out of 
the South. He left Atlanta, Georgia, last week and his only crime 
was that of being a Union man. He was a merchant in Atlanta 
and a very wealthy man.^ He says there is a reign of terror 
throughout the seceded states, that the people are not consulted, 
but the leaders of rebellion do just as they please. He came 
North in company with sixty-odd others, all wealthy men. That 

iSee page 7; also page 254. 

10 



142 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

affords some idea of the practical workings of secession. The 
South must be ruined. There are 18,000,000 whites in the North 
and 6,000,000 whites in the entire South. What can 6,000,000 
do in fighting the united North and keeping down their negroes? 
They have been led to believe that the North would not sustain 
the government. I think the difficulty will be settled soon. God 
knows we do not want to destroy our Southern brethren, but they 
should remember that it is their duty as good citizens to respect 
the laws. They have had their own way too long. Slavery 
makes men generous, but it also makes them tyrannical and 
overbearing. 

I have been laboring hard ever since I came here. The mili- 
tary committee, of which I am chairman, has nearly all the work 
of the whole legislature before it. We hope to be relieved soon. 
I fear we will be kept here longer than I thought when I wrote 
you before. If we do not adjourn this week, I will try and come 
home vSaturday if my engagements will permit. . . . 

Affectionately yours, 

W. Q. Gresham. 

The opposition to vesting in the Governor the appoint- 
ment of the officers of the regiments and the centrahzing 
features of the Gresham Military Bill prolonged the session. 
The opposition was not confined to the Democrats. Lead- 
ing Republicans were opposed to the measure as undemo- 
cratic and autocratic. Besides, many Republicans were 
disposed to let their judgment be guided by their feelings 
of resentment tow^ards Governor Morton. 

Horace Bell had returned from his Mexican experiences 
under Juarez, and when the legislature met, was in Camp 
Morton, the rendezvous for the volunteer troops at Indian- 
apolis, drilling the new companies as they came in. He was 
then in the service of the National government. There were 
sessions of the military committees, both of the Senate and 
of the House, as the bill had to be redrafted and repassed 
in the House. Bell was brought before these committees as 
a witness of recent experience who had served in Mexico and 
under Walker in the Nicaraguan War. In the Nicaraguan 



INDIANA PREPARES FOR WAR 143 

War he had met some of the ablest military men in the 
world, it was claimed. He had many works on military 
affairs and on the organization of armies. Reinforced by 
Bell's experience, his treatise on military affairs, and the tes- 
timony of the best military men in the State — among them 
Lew Wallace, Major Worth, an officer of the United States 
Army, stationed at Indianapolis, and especially Archibald 
Forbes' works on that subject — Walter Q. Gresham, with 
the aid of certain Democrats, put through the House again 
the bill he had drafted and passed at the regular session, 
vesting the appointment of the field and line officers of all 
regiments in the hands of the Governor, and so far as the 
law itself was concerned, it was made plain that politics and 
jealousies should be kept out of the military organization. 
One Republican voted against the bill because it would 
make the Governor a czar. Simeon K. Wolf, our fellow- 
townsman, represented Harrison County and two adjoin- 
ing counties, Washington and Crawford, in the Senate. 
Through Mr. Wolf the necessary Democratic aid was se- 
cured to put the bill through the Senate. 

One million of money was voted and the Governor was 
authorized to borrow $3,000,000 on the bonds of the State 
for the purpose of organizing the militia of the State. 

My husband also drafted, and succeeded in getting 
passed, what was known as his Home Guard Bill, which 
authorized the citizens of a county to organize themselves 
into companies and elect their own officers. This was 
intended to benefit the river counties. 

There was much dissatisfaction with Governor Morton 
because of some of the men he commissioned. Represen- 
tative Bingham of Jennings County, in a resolution which 
did not pass, and a speech in support of it, severely criti- 
cized Governor Morton for appointing Horace Heffron 
major of the Thirteenth Regiment. Mr. Heffron never 
accepted the appointment. He was known to be disloyal, 
and he subsequently accepted a commission from Jefferson 



144 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

Davis in the Confederate Army, though he never served 
south of the Ohio River. Governor Morton claimed that 
it was my husband who instigated Bingham to introduce 
this resolution and make the attack. My husband replied 
that he knew nothing of the resolution being introduced, as 
he was absent from the House at the time; "but," he said, 
"if I had been there, I would have supported it by speech 
and vote." Bingham was another man who never resumed 
cordial relations with the Governor, but, as he was young, 
in obedience to the demand of the old men Governor Mor- 
ton commissioned him the same as he did Gresham, against 
his will. 

These young men used their power unsparingly in inves- 
tigating all the acts of the Governor, especially those relat- 
ing to supplies furnished by the quartermaster-general to 
the soldiers. The Governor was compelled to give a strict 
account of the money placed at his disposal at the regular 
session, to be used as a contingent fund in purchasing sup- 
plies and arms. 

The special session ended June 2, and with it all the 
friendly relations that had ever existed between Walter Q. 
Gresham and the Governor. His colleagues, Veatch and 
Moody, in the House, and Senator Miller, in the Senate, 
and others, were given command of regiments, while he was 
denied any commission at all, although he tendered his 
services and demanded, as he claimed was his right, a 
colonel's commission. He then asked for a commission 
in the lower grades, which was refused. There were high 
words and the Governor was denounced to his face for vent- 
ing his personal feelings when the other had sacrificed his 
for the good of the cause. Horace Bell was present at the 
last meeting of the Governor and the chairman of the Mili- 
tary Committee of the House, and, of course, in Bell's ver- 
sion and telling of it, Mr. Gresham did not suffer. 

My husband made a number of trips home during the 
extra session to look after his law business. On these visits 



INDIANA PREPARES FOR WAR 145 

he brought a great many lawsuits, all of which he after- 
wards turned over to Mr. Slaughter. He remained at 
Indianapolis almost a week after the legislature adjourned, 
to argue in the Supreme Court the steamboat cases that had 
gone there from Crawford County. 



CHAPTER X 
OPENING OF THE WAR 



WALTER Q. GRESHAM ENLISTS AS A PRIVATE KENTUCKY 

LEGISLATURE ADJOURNS REBEL VICTORY AT BULL RUN 

CRITTENDEN RESOLUTIONS PUT THROUGH CONGRESS WAR 

TO PRESERVE THE UNION KENTUCKY STAYS WITH THE 

NORTH END OF NEUTRALITY GRESHAM COMMISSIONED 

LIEUTENANT-COLONEL OF THIRTY-EIGHTH INDIANA VOLUN- 
TEERS LOUISVILLE "courier" SUPPRESSED WAR BEGUN 

BUCKNER INVADES KENTUCKY WHY HE DID NOT GO 

TO LOUISVILLE GRESHAM MEETS SHERMAN KENTUCKY 

LEGISLATURE CALLS FOR 40,000 SOLDIERS LETTERS FROM 

KENTUCKY CAMPS GRESHAM STUDIES HARD ON PICKET 

DUTY SUFFERING OF WOMEN AT HOME GRESHAM TEN- 
DERED COLONELCY OF FIFTY-THIRD INDIANA REGIMENT. 

TT7 ALTER Q. GRESHAM came home very much disap- 
^ ' pointed and outraged that the Governor had refused 
him a commission, while on the other hand I was dehghted, 
as I felt that this might keep him out of service. But he 
bought books on military tactics and science, and imme- 
diately was instrumental in the organizing of a company, 
in which he enlisted as a private. It drilled at night in 
Corydon during the months of June and July. 

Still, like many others, I did not despair of a peaceable 
settlement of the trouble. I hoped there would be no real 
need for volunteers. With a woman's instinct, I knew what 
war would be for me. My prayers were for peace. I exacted 
pledges from my husband which I knew he could not keep 
should the actual contest come. I got no comfort in the 
assertion of my father that one Southern man would be 
equal to five or six Yankees, so that when it came to fighting 

146 



OPENING OF THE WAR 147 

there would be but little of it. My father frequently said 
to my husband, "You will not fight when the time comes, 
because it will be useless. You will let the South go." 
My father did not see, and this was the mistake of the 
Southern leaders, that it was a conviction that the Union 
should be preserved, and a question of morals, with such 
men as my husband. In the discussions with my father, 
I amused him when I told him that, as my native State 
was neutral, I would be a neutral ; and I angered him when 
I asked him why it was, if the Secessionists believed in 
"State's Rights," they did not let Kentucky alone. I 
thought if both sides would leave Kentucl<y alone, she 
would somehow settle the controversy. 

Meantime the Kentucky legislature, which had been 
meeting and adjourning at intervals since January 17, 
finally adjourned sine die. But before doing so it provided 
by a special statute that its successor, which was to be 
elected at the regular semi-annual election on the 4th of 
August following, and which, according to the general law, 
would not meet until January, 1862, should convene the 
first of September, 1861. The dissolving body two years 
before had elected John C. Breckenridge to the United 
States Senate. The shuttle-cock of faction under the guise 
of neutrality, it had been first on one side and then on the 
other. Each side wanted an early meeting of the new 
legislature because each anticipated an easy victory at 
the polls. Mr. Lincoln's "House Divided against Itself" 
speech, the Secessionists believed, would give them the 
State. The Union members believed that in providing for 
the organization of the Home Guards they would meet or 
neutralize the work of General Simon Bolivar Buckner, who 
was then marshaling the Kentucky militia. 

The Rebel victory at Bull Run, July 21, brought home 
to both sides the conviction that it was to be a finish fight. 
When it came to practical politics, Abraham Lincoln had 
them all beaten. He not only "played both ends" but 



148 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

also "the middle." On July 22 the same John J. Crittenden 
we have so often quoted, then a Union member of the 
House from Kentucky, put through Congress, with Mr. 
Lincoln's approval, a series of resolutions: "That Congress, 
banishing all the feelings of mere passion or resentment, 
will recollect only its duty to the whole country; that the 
war is not waged in any spirit of oppression, or for any 
purpose of conquest or subjugation, or the overthrowing or 
interfering with the rights or established institutions of the 
seceding states, but to defend and maintain the supremacy 
of the Constitution, and preserve the Union with all the 
dignity, equality, and rights of the several states unim- 
paired, and that as soon as these objects are accomplished, 
the war ought to cease." They passed the House with only 
five dissenting votes, and the Senate, where they were in- 
troduced by Andrew Johnson, with only two votes in the 
negative. Charles Sumner, in the Senate, and Thaddeus 
Stevens and Owen Lovejoy, in the House, could not swal- 
low them, but they dared not vote against them; for 
Wendell Phillips, as the Massachusetts troops were going 
to the front, after taking back all the harsh and unkind 
things he had said for years about his native State, was 
uttering patriotic sentiments in terms as glowing as any 
that ever fell from the lips of Daniel Webster. Not a 
word then about "those clients who stood dumb within 
the law."^ 

A year later, however, when the Union armies were in 
the heart of Dixie, Phillips began to make life a burden for 
Mr. Lincoln about abolition. As a woman, I feel that the 
pledges which were made to the Kentuckians about com- 
pensation should have been liberally kept by the Govern- 
ment. Many refined and cultured Kentucky women were 
impoverished because of the loyalty of their fathers and 
husbands and brothers in i860 and 1861. John J. Critten- 
den died a broken and disappointed but not a bitter man. 

iSee page 205. 



OPENING OF THE WAR 



149 



The adoption of the Crittenden resolutions was the 
trump card in Kentucky. Most of the Kentucky slave- 
holders, on the 4th of August, 1861, sided with the Union, 
and a decided majority of the members that day elected 
were Union men. But it was really a pro-slavery legislature. 
Its first act was to declare "that no citizen shall be molested 
on account of his political opinions; that no citizen's prop- 
erty shall be taken or confiscated because of such opinions 
[this was to meet the segregation acts of the Confederate 
Congress, confiscating the property of those who gave aid 
and comfort to the enemy], nor shall any slave be set free by 
any military commander.'' 

This 4th of August election was the end of "neutrality." 
Instead of its operating as many beHeved and hoped for, 
and I was of that number, there was soon a forward move- 
ment all along the line. To my father, who was still 
declaring the Abolitionists would not fight, my husband 
said, "You will soon be undeceived." But even then I 
was not prepared for the shock that came a few days later 
when my husband showed me a commission he had just re- 
ceived as Lieutenant-Colonel of the Thirty-eighth Indiana, 
which was to be organized shortly at Camp Noble in New 
Albany. Samuel J. Wright and others had protested to 
Governor Morton against sending commissions to "cripples 
and invaHds and traitors," to men who could not and would 
not accept, while the only man Harrison County had fit to 
command was ignored. Mr. Wright was an enrolling officer 
and on more than one occasion his strong and picturesque 
language "riled" Indiana's great War Governor. 

I was no Spartan. I was unlike many women who at 
that time urged their husbands and brothers to go forth 
for their country. Instinctively I felt the suffering that 
must come on the innocent, and my experience justified all 
my fears. But the suffering and -anxiety that I afterwards 
went through was nothing compared to what other women 
endured and suffered, both North and South. For this 



I50 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

reason, I have always protested against war as a means 
of settling national differences. It is often corrupting to 
nations as well as to men and women. Possibly my 
father's views made it harder for me than for most women, 
and made me see more clearly into the future. Had he 
been a younger man, I have no doubt he would have gone 
to the Confederacy. He used his influence with my brother 
to keep him from the Union army, even after Governor 
Morton had sent him a commission. 

Colonel Benjamin F. Scribner, a veteran of the Mexi- 
can War, had been commissioned Colonel of the Thirty- 
eighth Indiana. Daniel G. Griffin, my father's adopted 
son, then in the employ of the Louisville, New Albany & 
Chicago Railroad Compan}^ and several years removed 
from my father's influence, went out as adjutant of the 
regiment. He was then as he had been for a long time, 
Captain of the Anderson Rifles, a crack local military 
organization that had reorganized as one of the two home 
guard companies apportioned to New Albany under the Gres- 
ham Home Guard Bill. The other New Albany company 
was the Sanderson Guards. So suddenly was the Thirty- 
eighth organized that, at the conclusion one evening of his 
company drill, Captain Griffin had time only to send a 
short note to a young lady. Miss Mary Compton, whom 
he was to marry, stating that, instead of calling on her, he 
would enlist that night and at once take part in the or- 
ganization of a new regiment. Many of the officers of 
the Twenty-third Indiana, then at Camp Noble and well 
along in organization, had graduated from Dan Griffin's 
Anderson Rifles. William L. Sanderson, a veteran of the 
Mexican War, and one of New Albany's most respected 
and dignified citizens, was the Colonel, and George S. 
Babbitt,^ Dan Griffin's special friend and a graduate of the 
Anderson Rifles, was one of its captains. Daniel Griffin's 
military training at the Kentucky Militar}^ Institute was 

ISee pages 242, 282, 294-5. 3o6 and 319. . 



OPENING OF THE WAR 



151 



invaluable at that time to the Union cause. Small in 
stature, he was par excellence a drillmaster. The Home 
Guard companies had been organized all over southern 
Indiana. On July 4 there was a grand review and prize 
drill at Camp Noble. With half of his old men in other 
organizations as officers, Dan Griffin with the Anderson 
Rifles took the first prize, and then showed the veteran 
officers of the Mexican War how to handle a battaHon 
and a regiment. 

"MoUie" Compton was greatly delighted at all this. 
A cheery, lighthearted girl, she had many bouts with my 
father because he could not keep the boy he raised and 
his son-in-law out of the Union army. Doctor Payne, a 
bitter Secessionist, who married my eldest sister, went out 
as the surgeon of one of the southern IlHnois regiments. 
Stephen A. Douglas had pulled him into hne. My father 
confided to Miss Compton that while he did not have much 
influence with the Yankee members of his family, he was 
glad they were good officers. What to me was a reality 
from the start — that war was hell — MolHe lived to learn. 
She married Dan Griffin on one of his short furloughs home, 
and then before the end of the war soothed his last hours 
as a brevet brigadier-general of volunteers. In those form- 
ative days my father was in the commission business with 
headquarters at 7th and Main Streets, Louisville. He 
never lowered his colors, but in 1862 retired from business, 
rather than ' ' become a Union man and make lots of money 
as an army contractor." 

Part of the men of the Thirty-eighth were without 
arms until they started for Kentucky. At Camp Noble 
I saw nfen of the regiment drilled in company move- 
ments without arms and in some cases carrying sticks for 
guns. On the 21st day of August Colonel Scribner wired to 
the War Department, and to Governor Morton, the follow- 
ing dispatch: "I have a regiment of men nearly ready for 
service; do you want them?" 



152 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

Within an hour he received the following answer from 
Govenor Morton : "You are accepted. Report to Adjutant- 
General Noble at Indianapolis." 

Camp Noble was on the northeastern outskirts of New 
Albany, in what was known as the State Fair Grounds. 
Within two miles of Camp Noble was Camp Joe Holt, 
which had been established by Lovell H. Rousseau on 
land that belonged to Blanton Duncan of Louisville. This 
land was in the original grant of the United States to 
George Rogers Clark and his soldiers and lay about a mile 
down the river from the State Prison, which was at the 
western limits of Jeffersonville, just across the river from 
Louisville. The site was selected partly because of its 
easy access from Louisville, and also because, some two 
months before, in defiance of Kentucky neutrality, Blanton 
Duncan, its owner, had led a regiment of Kentuckians to 
the Confederacy. 

Rousseau, afterwards a Union general, was a Louis- 
ville lawyer who had seen service in the Mexican War at a 
time when he was a citizen of Indiana. As a member of 
the legislature of Kentucky, which had just adjourned, 
he had resisted secession. His idea was that it would be 
observing Kentucky neutrality to establish the camp on 
the Indiana side and at the same time get ready for the 
emergency that would demand troops. Another so-called 
Kentucky recruiting station. Camp Clay, was established 
opposite Cincinnati, about the time Camp Joe Holt was es- 
tablished. Most of Rousseau's officers were Kentuckians, 
but his men were recruited from the slums of Louisville, 
among the deck-hands of the steamboats, and from Indiana 
volunteers. It was on July i that Rousseau established 
his camp. Of course Adjutant-General Buckner of Ken- 
tucky had no hand in it. The tents were made in New 
Albany by Wm. A. Daily and were paid for by the National 
government, which also furnished the arms. At first the 
organization was called the "Louisville Legion" and Stone's 



OPENING OF THE WAR 153 

Battery; later, the Second Kentucky Cavalry, the Fifth 
Kentucky Infantry, and Stone's Indiana Battery. The 
young, active Kentuckians were not yet ready to enlist. 
Several months later they did. But in the Summer of 1861 
it is true, as General Sherman said, that most of the act- 
ive young men were inclined to the Confederacy or were 
noncommittal. On July 12, when he predicted he would 
have 1,500 men in Camp Joe Holt, General Rousseau could 
count only 800. 

While I was never in Camp Joe Holt, I spent many days 
at Camp Noble, where I ate the soldiers' fare, drank coffee 
out of a tin cup, heard the conversation of the officers as 
they talked of visits to Camp Joe Holt, and saw some of 
the Kentucky officers who came to Camp Noble. Many 
of the New Albany people visited Camp Joe Holt to see 
the dress parade. Enough time had clasped since its 
establishment to make the Rousseau regiments proficient 
in drills. Among the visitors who went to see the Ken- 
tuckians drill were the New Albany young ladies, among 
whom MolHe Compton was a leader. Then she would 
come back to Camp Noble and tell Dan Griffin how much 
better drilled and armed the Kentuckians were than the 
Thirty-eighth. One of the results of these visits to Camp 
Joe Holt was a number of "matches" followed by marriage. 

It was after the Kentucky election on August 4 that 
President Lincoln authorized Lieutenant Nelson of the 
navy to arm a camp that was organizing at Camp Dick 
Robinson, near Danville, Kentucky, and made his cele- 
brated answer to Governor Magoffin's protest against this 
violation of the neutraHty of Kentucky, that "it did not 
seem contrary to the wishes of a majority of the people 
of Kentucky for the force to remain at Camp Dick Robin- 
son." At the same time the Governor wrote to Jefferson 
Davis, the President of the Confederacy, that while he did 
not fear the massing of so many troops on the Kentucky 
border on the south, yet it created uneasiness in the minds 



154 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

of many. Mr. Davis answered under date of August 28 
that the purpose of the concentration of the troops on the 
Tennessee border was to be in readiness to repel the in- 
vasion of that State by the Union forces, and that the Con- 
federacy would respect Kentucky's neutrality so long as 
she herself maintained it. 

Meanwhile the Kentucky State Guard under Adjutant- 
General Buckner was concentrating at Camp Boone, Ten- 
nessee. They became the Second, Fourth, and Fifth Ken- 
tucky regiments of the Confederate army; and General 
Buckner, as a brigadier-general in the Confederate army, 
was put in command at Camp Boone. 

The plan of the Confederates was to claim that the 
neutrality of the State had been violated by the camp at 
Dick Robinson, and to invade the State all along the line 
and call the Secessionists to arms. Governor Magoffin 
was in the plan, as were many other leading men, some 
secretly, others openly. Among those working in secret 
was George D. Prentice. 

September 3 the Confederate General Polk, late a bishop 
in the Episcopal Church South, occupied Columbus. Gen- 
eral Grant immediately took possession of Paducah. On 
the 15th of September Buckner moved up to Bowling Green, 
and two days later part of his forces were within fifty miles 
of Louisville. 

At Bowling Green, General Buckner issued a proclamation 
which was published in all the Louisville newspapers, to the 
effect that he came at the head of Kentucky troops to pre- 
serve Kentucky neutrality, and as soon as that was re- 
established he would retire from the State. The Courier 
was teeming with sedition and secession, while Prentice in 
the Journal was deploring the inertia and supineness that 
prevailed. "Not a man has volunteered, the Governor 
and city authorities are doing nothing. All an enemy has 
to do is to walk in, hang his hat up, and take possession of 
the mansion." All of which duly reached Buckner's camp. 



OPENING OF THE WAR 155 

In the event that Buckner reached Louisville, aside from 
all the circumstances and Prentice's declaration that when 
it came to a war for the subjugation of the seceding States, 
Kentucky should take her stand with the South, I have 
Henry Watterson's statement that Prentice was prepared 
to welcome Buckner to the city by running up the Stars and 
Bars over the Journal building. 

And why did not Buckner come? The answer is in what 
had taken place at Camp Noble and Camp Joe Holt. 

On the 1 8th of September the Kentucky legislature, after 
General Pope had ignored its request of September 11 to 
retire from the State, requested General Robert Anderson, 
the Federal commander and a "native" Kentuckian, to take 
instant command, with authority and power from the com- 
monwealth to call out a volunteer force in Kentucky for the 
purpose of repelling the invaders." 

The same day the Louisville Courier was suppressed 
because it was a "Rebel sheet," as the government of the 
United States expressed it. It was afterwards published 
from Bowling Green and Nashville while those places were 
occupied by the Confederate army. My father took it 
while it was published from these places. He would bring 
it to me, with glowing accounts of the success of the Con- 
federate army. It greatly disturbed and distressed me, so 
one day I told him he must remember my husband was in 
the "Yankee" army, and that I could not stand the discus- 
sions we were having and could not listen to the news he was 
bringing me. He said I was right, and that was the last I 
heard of the Courier until after the close of the war, when 
it appeared again in Louisville with Simon Bolivar Buckner 
as the editor. So it must not be understood that Buckner 
never got to Louisville. 

General Sherman, in his " Memoirs," does not make plain 
the day that Rousseau's regiments crossed the river and 
advanced south to meet "the sudden and unexpected inva- 
sion of Kentucky by Buckner. ' ' He states that on the order 



156 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

of General Anderson he went over to Jeffersonville and in 
an hour had the regiments on the march to the ferry, and 
that they went thence that night by rail to Lebanon Junc- 
tion. He also states that James Guthrie of the Peace 
Conference, the president of the Louisville & Nashville 
Railroad, arranged for the special train which carried the 
Rousseau brigade to Lebanon Junction. One of the stories 
of the times was that the Rousseau Louisville Legion and 
Stone's Battery crossed the river to Louisville, on the 
1 8th of September; that the cavalry regiment marched to 
Lebanon Junction, while the infantry and the battery went 
at night by train to the same point. 

The Thirty-eighth Indiana was mustered into the serv- 
ice of the United States government on the i8th of Septem- 
ber. It left the camp on the afternoon of the 21st, Satur- 
day, and as the men marched through the streets of New 
Albany they were met by wagons from the Jeffersonville 
Penitentiary carrying arms for those who had not yet been 
supplied, and knapsacks for the entire regiment. They 
were without cartridge boxes, but at Louisville ammunition 
was issued to them, which they carried in their pockets. 
The excitement was great as they went through Louisville. 
James Guthrie had arranged for a freight train on the Louis- 
ville & Nashville Railroad, and they went that night to 
Lebanon Junction. 

In a few words, in a letter written home at this time, in 
pencil, my husband pictures the rapid, exhausting march : 

Camp Sherman, 
September 24, 1861 
We left Louisville Saturday night about 10 o'clock and worked 
our way cautiously to Lebanon Junction, arriving there about 
7 A.M. Sunday. We halted a few hours, and then took up our 
March for Elizabethtown, where we arrived about sunset after 
a very fatiguing march. We crossed Rolling Fork where the 
bridge was burnt, the water being nearly up to our shoulders. 
The boys plunged in with a will. 



OPENING OF THE WAR ic;; 

Our object in moving on so rapidly was to get to Elizabeth- 
town before the Rebels, which we did. We encamped for the 
night, sleeping on the ground, and yesterday morning came out 
here, where we have stopped to meet the enemy. Our baggage 
is all back at the Junction, but we expect it to-day. I have not 
had my clothes off since I left New Albany, and I never felt 
better in my life. 

We all expected to have fun at Elizabethtown, but Buckner 
was not there. We have now here about 4,500 men and a battery 
of six guns. By to-night or to-morrow morning the number will 
be swelled to 6,000. 

General Sherman is a strong man. He pays no attention to 
the traps and trimmings. He has brains and is all the time 
wide awake. 

My prospect now to get home soon is not very good 

September 25 the Kentucky legislature, over the veto of 
the Governor, called for 40,000 Kentuckians to serve for 
not less than one year nor more than three to repel from the 
State the armed invasion from the South. That even then 
the Kentuckians did not come forward with alacrity is mani- 
fest when we consider that thirty days later but fifteen 
Kentucky regiments had been organized, while in the mean- 
time there had reached Kentucky seventeen Indiana regi- 
ments, aggregating 18,187 men; and thirteen Ohio reg- 
iments, three from Pennsylvania, two from Minnesota, and 
several from other States. 

The following letter from Colonel Gresham is of interest 
at this point : 

Camp Muldrough Hill, 

September 27, 1861 

I wrote you the other day by Mr. Cannon, giving you a brief 
account of our march to this place. We had a hard time of it for 
several days, but we now have our tents and supplies and are 
living finely. Give yourself no trouble on my account for really 
I believe I can enjoy myself better when we are hard up than 
at any other time. I can stand as much hunger, heat, and cold as 
any other man. It is all over now, but for three days we lived 

11 



158 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

on meat alone and that too of a poor quality, 3^et I never was in 
better spirits in my life. You need not be afraid of my risking 
my life unnecessarily. I want to live, I confess, on my own ac- 
count, but more on your and the children's account. 

Our force is still increasing. We have a most splendid army. 
Rousseau's men, as a whole, are the worst in the camp. His 
brigade is composed mostly of low, worthless men who have no 
pride nor character. Of course, there are exceptions. The Ohio 
troops can't be beat, but old Hoosier, God bless her, stands head 
and shoulders above all the States. The Indianians are cheered 
wherever we find Union people in Kentucky. The Kentucky 
officers all say the Hoosier soldiers are the best in the Union, 
but they claim that we are all descendants of the Kentuckians. 

I was field officer of the day from yesterday morning till 
this morning. It is the duty of the field officer to station the 
pickets according to the instructions of the general. I started 
out this morning at two o'clock on the grand rounds, visiting all 
the pickets. Several times during the night the pickets fired on 
men trying to get through the lines. 

Can't say how long we will remain here, perhaps a week 
or two weeks. 

I shall be all night making the grand rounds. The grand 
round is visiting all the pickets after night and seeing they are all 
faithful and that nothing is wrong. We will start out at ten and 
get in about daylight. 

I have received the sword, belt, etc., presented me by my 
friends. It is a very nice one and I prize it highly. Our boys are 
all doing finely — very little sickness, none of a serious character. 
I am getting stouter every day; think I am going to grow fat if 
I stay in camp long. 

Here I must anticipate and relate what General Sher- 
man afterwards told me many times — first at the Gayoso 
House in Memphis.^ I give his exact words: "When your 
husband came to report to me at. Muldrough Hill, he w^as 
the handsomest young fellow I had ever seen, with his 
black hair and brilliant eyes, but what delighted me more 
than I can tell was what he said — 'General, we know 
nothing about soldiering, but are here to obey orders, study, 

iSee page 194. 



OPENING OFTHEWAR 159 

and learn.' He, I said to myself, is the kind of man I am 
looking for; he will learn, and I ordered him and his reg- 
iment right out to the front. I put him on the picket line 
and kept him there most of the time he was with me." 

It so happened that Colonel Scribner was absent when 
the Thirty-eighth Indiana Volunteers first reported to Gen- 
eral Sherman, and thus it was the lieutenant-colonel who 
spoke for it. 

Walter Q. Gresham could obey and did obey his supe- 
riors. He recognized the trained soldier as his master. 
But when it came to political, legal, and moral questions 
it will appear he recognized no party ^ and no man as his 
master, neither General vSherman nor General Grant.- 

I give a number of letters received by me at this time: 

Camp Muldrough Hill, 

September 30, 1861 

Yesterday was Sunday. At nine in the inorning we were in- 
spected by General Sherman. He is a very sinc^lar man ^ very 
plain — more regardless of his appearance than I am — says but 
little. He is decidedly a man of action. He has a regular mili- 
tary education. Was in command in California during the Reign 
of the Vigilantes. 

From present indications I think we will soon have a large 
army here. Ihave just learned from Mr. Wintersmith that the 
famous Sixty-ninth Irish Regiment of New York is back at the 
Junction. In addition to that, troops are coming in from Penn- 
sylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. The boasted chivalry of 
Kentucky are great for bragging on each other, but at a time like 
this, when their State is invaded, you would think every man 
would step forth to battle for her rights. She is lukewarm. 

I am satisfied the administration intends to make this army 
50,000 or 75,000 strong and send it to Nashville and there operate 
in conjunction with Fremont on the Mississippi. I was told by a 
gentleman last night who knows or who is in a position to know, 
that 40,000 men are ordered from Washington here, that is, to 
Kentucky and Tennessee by this route. 

Scores of Kentuckians are coming in daily and taking the oath. 

1 See pages 184, 458, 656 and 670. ~ See pages 427 and 469. 



i6o LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

Some come over twenty miles. Some of them seem to be much 
reHeved after taking the oath and being forgiven, as a guilty sinner 
after his load of sin is removed. 

Our chaplain sings well, prays well, preaches well, and I am 
satisfied will fight well. 

You can make such disposition of the home as you like. If 
you could rent it to a good family, perhaps you had better do 

it. . . . 

Camp Muldrough, Kentucky, 

October 6, 1861 
It is now 5 o'clock in the afternoon, and I have been in the 
saddle all day— I think I have traveled over twenty miles. I am 
field officer of the day and have charge of all the outposts or 
pickets. We have thrown out our pickets from two to four 
miles around the camp. 

Dan has been with me to-day and although it has been raining 
on us pretty much all the time we have had a good time of it. 
Dan is the best adjutant in the brigade; he is altogether the most 
perfect man I ever saw, and the more I am with him the more I 
see about him to admire. He has fine military talent. 

Our regiment has improved most marvelously since we came 
here. I never studied so hard in my life as I have in the last two 
weeks. I am determined to be up with the best of them. 

Camp Nevin, Kentucky, 

October 24, 1861 

I am pleased with the way General Sherman is managing this 
column of the army. He is organizing it on a large scale, I assure 
you, and when we do move forward the Rebels will have no child's 
play of it fighting us. We belong to General Wood's brigade, 
which consists of the Twenty-ninth, Thirty-eighth, and Thirty- 
ninth Indiana Regiments, and General McCook says we are the 
best brigade he ever saw anywhere. We drill eight hours every 
day, so you see we are not idle. 

A Pennsylvania brigade comes up to-night. I will go down to 
meet them and see if John Jones is along. 

The Second Minnesota got up this morning, but I have not 
had time to call on them and see whether Bill [the younger 
brother] is along or not. I hope he is, for I don't want him to stay 
at home at a time like this. 



OPENING OF THE WAR i6i 

There was quite a scene at General Wood's headquarters last 
night. Fourteen slaves belonging to his father, living on Green 
River, walked all the way to him for protection. The general 
told me that one of the servants, his sister's maid, who is intelligent 
and virtuous, was robbed of her clothing, and she came to him 
with a blanket wrapped around her. He also says that the Rebels 
made the Union ladies give up their finger rings and everything 
of value. 

Camp Nevin, Kentucky, 
November 8, 1861 

I have just returned this morning from picket duty; I went 
on yesterday morning — and have been in the saddle at least twenty 
hours out of the twenty-four. I lay down last night in the woods 
and took a short nap. 

Camp life agrees with me finely. My health has not been as 
good as it now is for years. If you are just as comfortable as I am, 
you will do well this winter. 

Yesterday evening Colonel McHenry of Owensboro sent into 
our camp fifteen secesh cavalrymen, with their horses, etc., which 
were captured by him when on their way to join Buckner. I 
saw them last night. They were anxious to take the oath and be 
forgiven, but they were not so fortunate as that. They will be 
confined as prisoners of war, or handed over to the loyal author- 
ities of Kentucky to be dealt with. We are still at Camp Nevin 
and I can't say When we will leave. The men are all anxious for 
a move. 

The greatest sufferers in the war were the women who 
were left behind. I saw something of the suffering and woe 
the war brought to the Southern women and I sympathized 
with them. To many a youth the war for most of the time 
was a holiday. The men in authority and at the front had 
none of the heartrending, anxious times the women had. 
A war is an evil not so much because of the loss of life 
and physical pain that is inflicted, but because of the cor- 
rupting influence it has on society — with its swarms of 
contractors, sutlers, and parasites of every kind. In our 
war, the destruction of private property, the property of 



i62 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

non-combatants — because of its use by the enemy — to me 
was horrible. The only time I ever heard my husband 
question the wisdom of any of Sherman's acts was after the 
"Meridian campaign" in January, 1864, when he said, "It 
was awful the way we burned bridges, mills and grain, and 
private property of every description that could be used by 
our enemy ; but our orders were imperative. ' ' For such work 
he had no heart. Southern people blame General Sherman 
for much unnecessary, and as they put it, wanton destruction 
of private property. But that property was not destroyed 
until it was evident that it was being used to help sustain a 
cause that the pitched battles had already demonstrated 
could not succeed, and until the Confederates themselves 
were getting close to the line that divides the war of the civil- 
ized man from that of the savage, if there is such a line. 
General Sherman simply applied the rules of his profession 
to the case before him, and made war, however it may be 
disguised, what it really is — hell. Honest, generous, and 
warm-hearted, when the end came, he was the most mag- 
nanimous man in the North. 

I quote several other letters sent me from the field: 

Camp Nevin, Kentucky, 
November 29, 1861 

Captains Carter and Glover have succeeded in getting fur- 
loughs for a few days to visit their families, and I take advantage 
of the opportunity to send you a few lines. 

We are in very much the same condition as when I wrote you 
last — no worse and not much better. One poor fellow died last 
night in his tent and another is dying now. It has been raining 
constantly for three or four days. Last night the very heavens 
seemed to open. The informntirm from Buckner's anny is that 
the mortality there is much greater than it is here. He lost 
over a hundred men in one day last week. 

We are waiting here for reinforcements before we move, but 
every preparation is being made now to advance. Pontoon 
bridges are being buih which we will take with us for the purpose 



OPENINGOFTHEWAR 163 

of crossing creeks and rivers. It is thought we will get off next 
week. I hope we will move soon, for I think a change will do the 
men good. 

My health continues good. I never felt better in my life. 

Camp Nevin, Kentucky, 

November 30, 1861 

Another Sunday is well-nigh gone and the remainder of it will 
be devoted to writing you a letter. The last two or three days 
have been cold and disagreeable, but we have fared well. Some 
of ovir boys have invented a very good substitute for a stove. 
You have seen the old-style kiln for drying fruit. It is made on 
that principle. A flue is at one end of the tent, extending inside 
about two feet, with a small chimney at the end outside. By this 
means our tents are made quite comfortable. Lesh Pfrimmer 
and John Springer of Captain Carter's company were good 
enough to build a very nice one for me yesterday, for which they 
received my warmest thanks. I am fortunate enough to have 
plenty of good friends. I verily believe there are men in this 
regiment who would deny themselves almost everything to 
accommodate and please me. There is nothing like having 
good friends in the army. The man who has no friends is not 
deserving of them. 

Major Merriwether and I have moved together, and we now 
occupy the same tent. He is a very clever gentleman and we get 
along very agreeably. 

I am now more at a loss than ever as to the intention of General 
Sherman in regard to the movements of this division of the army. 
I am satisfied he intended to make a forward movement some ten 
days ago, but the reported reinforcement of the Rebels likely 
induced him to postpone his contemplated attack until he gets 
further reinforcements. I have great confidence in his judgment. 
In fact, I have almost learned to believe that anything he does 
is right. I am satisfied that if he is left free to pursue his own 
way, he will speedily expel the Rebels from Kentucky. All com- 
munication with our camp is now cut off, General Sherman not 
allowing any civilian to enter our lines. The Rebels were in the 
habit of coming into camp with loud professions of loyalty to the 
Union, taking the oath of fealty, swearing that they would remain 



i64 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

true and loyal and in no way aid or countenance the rebellion by 
giving information or otherwise, and thus they were enabled to 
get a peep at our camp, after which they would straightway go to 
Buckner and report what they had seen, the number of men we 
have, and everything else that they could remember that would 
be of service to the Rebels. 

Tell Tom bad reports have come out here concerning the Cory- 
don Home Guards. It is said that when they got to Mauckport 
they refused to cross the river on the ground that they were Home 
Guards and were not bound to leave the State. In other words, 
the report comes here from Mauckport and Louisville that the 
Cory don Home Guards acted the coward— that they were afraid 
to cross the river when called on. I feel sensitive on the subject 
myself, and I want Tom to write me giving the particulars. Did 
the boys refuse to cross the river from fear? I can't believe it. 

Camp Nevin, Kentucky, 

December 7, 1861 
"Remember the vSabbath day to keep it holy," is one of the 
solemn injunctions of that good book, but I am inclined to believe 
that it was not meant to apply to the army. You see very little 
in the army to remind you of the manner in which "home folks" 
spend the Lord's day. It is true that where there is no immediate 
prospect of an engagement the men are permitted to rest from 
their labors to some extent on the Sabbath, but still it is not like 
a Sunday at home. 

Camp Nevin, Kentucky, 

December 9, 1861 
We moved yesterday evening from our old camp. We are 
about two miles southwest of where we were. General Buell 
has issued an order changing our brigades. We are now in the 
Seventh Brigade under General Negley of Pennsylvania. We 
were before under General Wood and in the Second Brigade, com- 
posed exclusively of Hoosiers. General Negle^-'s brigade is com- 
posed of two Pennsylvania regiments, the First Wisconsin, and 
ours, the Thirty-eighth Indiana, with a battery of six guns. The 
First Wisconsin is said to be the finest regiment in the army of 
Ohio. Can't say that I am displeased with the change, though 
I know nothing about General Negley. It was thought that it 



OPENING OF THE WAR 165 

would have a good effect to mix up the regiments from the different 
states; in other words, it was thought it would have a tendency to 
nationalize the army. The boys are well pleased with the change 
of camp. I think the sick will improve more rapidly now. 

General Buell, by a general order, has convened a general court- 
martial, which assembles every day at headquarters. It is com- 
posed of a dozen officers. It is the duty of a court-martial to try 
all offenders against military laws, etc. There is not much mercy 
shown a man when he is brought before a court-martial for diso- 
bedience, negligence, or almost anything else that is unbecoming 
a good soldier. I am a member of this court, and I guess you 
would think I had a stony heart if you could be present at some of 
our trials. We have not inflicted the death penalty yet, but can't 
say how long it will be till we do. 

I received a letter from Judge Otto the other day, from Indian- 
apolis, stating that I had been proposed to the President as a 
suitable person to be appointed brigadier-general. I hardly know 
whether I want the appointment or not. Am a little afraid it is 
climbing a little too fast, though I believe I am as well quali- 
fied as a majority of our brigadiers. The judge is at the bottom 
of the thing, and it has all been done without consulting me. 
Say nothing about it, for people would think you were bragging. 

If it is so I can possibly get down to Louisville, Christmas, I 
will meet you there, but don't rely on anything of the kind, for it 
is very uncertain. We are now waiting for the gunboats at Cairo. 
We will move simultaneously with that column. They will likely 
be ready in the next ten days. We have now got a pretty large 
army in Kentucky. It is strung all the way from here to Louis- 
ville. 

I wish you could take a peep at us; you would be better satis- 
fied afterwards. We live much better than you imagine. Mrs. 
Scribncr has just left camp. She said she had no idea that we 
could get along as well as we do. But now no women can enter 
our lines, there being a general order against it. 

Camp Negley, Kentucky, 

December 10, 186 1 
I have little time to write. We are all preparing to go to Green 
River. Part of the force started yesterday. We will all go ahead 



i66 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

just as fast as our transportation will admit. I will be apt to go 
to Green River to-morrow, whether our regiment goes or notv 
The general court-martial of which I spoke in my last letter will 
adjourn to-day to meet there — Mumfordsville — to-morrow, and 
being a member of the court I will have to go along. Heretofore 
the troops have been stationed all along the line of the road 
from here to Louisville, but now they are being ordered forward. 
We will have on Green River by vSunday an army of 25,000 men; 
that, though, will not include all our force. 

I received a letter from Governor Morton Saturday tendering 
me the colonelcy of the Fifty-third Indiana Regiment, now being 
organized at Indianapolis. I have written back accepting the 
appointment, but the court-martial and this forward movement 
may keep me here some time yet, and I may not take the appoint- 
ment at all. As soon as I can leave here a few days I want to run 
up to Indianapolis and see how things look. General Wood and 
my friends here outside the Thirty-eighth advise me to accept. 
It is not generally known in our regiment that the Governor has 
tendered me the command of the Fifty-third. 

Camp Wood, Kentucky, 

December 15, 1861 

When I wrote you last we were preparing to move. We got 
down here (near Green River) Wednesday night about 8 o'clock. 
We are all much better pleased than we were before. We are 
camped on high ground. The air is pure and bracing, and I am 
confident our sick list will constantly grow less. I wonder that 
any of us kept our health at Camp Nevin. It was a miserable 
sickly place. 

Our court-martial is still sitting. We hoped to have been 
able to adjourn last week but new cases are constantly coming 
before us. As soon as the court adjourns I want to run up to 
Indianapolis and see how the Fifty-third looks. If I can get it 
ready to enter the service soon, I will take command of it, and if 
I can't I will decline. Lieutenant-Colonel Burgess is very anxious 
for me to accept. I have just heard from him. 

Meantime I want you to come down and visit me here. 
Write promptly and let me know if you are coming and I 
will meet vou. 



OPENING OF THE WAR 167 

Here I must bid good-bye to the Thirty-eighth Indiana 
Volunteers. It was one of the three hundred fighting reg- 
iments that supported the Union cause. It lost 411 men. 
But one Indiana regiment suffered a greater mortality — ■ 
the Thirtieth, with 412. It "veteranized," or re-enlisted, 
in 1864, 247 strong. At Perryville, after it had exhausted 
forty rounds of ammunition, Colonel Scribner and Lieuten- 
ant-Colonel Griffin held it in line with fixed bayonets for 
twenty-five minutes in the face of a galling fire, until relieved 
to go to the rear and fill cartridge boxes. This was Colonel 
Scribner's last service with that regiment. Civil engineer 
that he was, the sketches he sent home and his letters show 
that Dan Griffin was competent to criticize Buell and Rose- 
crans "for not leading them on." Under Colonel Griffin, 
it was said, "night or day the Thirty-eighth was always 
ready for any duty." 



CHAPTER XI 
THE FIFTY-THIRD INDIANA VOLUNTEERS 



ORGANIZATION OF THE REGIMENT- — -GRESHAM FIRST 

COLONEL THE FIFTY-THIRD GUARDS PRISONERS CAPTURED 

AT FORT DONELSON — GOES DOWN MISSISSIPPI RIVER TO JOIN 
GENERAL GRANT — SICKNESS IN CAMP — REGIMENT GOES UP 
OHIO AND TENNESSEE RIVERS TOWARD SAVANNAH. 

A TELEGRAM changed our plans, so instead of going to 
■^"^ Muldrough Hill or one of the other camps for a visit, we 
met at Louisville. On my way there I stopped at the resi- 
dence of Samuel and "Aunt vSally" Patterson in Jefferson- 
ville. Unknown to me, at the same time came Governor 
Morton and Mrs. Morton. It was one of the few times I 
ever saw Governor Morton. He was a handsome man and 
naturally an object of great curiosity to me. Our meeting 
was not cordial. But it was more embarrassing to the 
Governor than to me. He knew that I knew that he had 
not commissioned my husband because he wanted to do so, 
and that I knew of the things that had been said to him 
and about him. The next morning "Aimt Sally" Patterson 
said with a sniff, "The Governor and Mrs. M. have gone to 
Louisville." But she was a wise woman, and her husband's 
railroad was making lots of money at that time handling 
State troops and munitions of war. 

My husband and I met at the Gault Hotel, Louisville, 
for Christmas. From Louisville he went to Indianapolis, 
where it was at first supposed the Fifty-third was practically 
ready for the field; but instead it was only a paper organi- 
zation. Horace Bell, the hero of the famous kidnapping 
affair, was then in Indianapolis in the service of the War 
Department, and my husband wanted him to be lieutenant- 
colonel of the new regiment. The Governor was willing to 
commission him. Bell said, but imposed conditions that he, 

1 68 



FIFTY -THIRD INDIANA VOLUNTEERS i6g 

Bell, could not comply with, namely, that he bear part of the 
expenses of organizing the regiment. There was a stormy 
interview between the Governor and Mr. Gresham in the 
Governor's office. Some of the things Bell reported that 
"Gresham said to the Governor's face" were awful, and I 
will not repeat them. These statements and also Bell's own 
assertion that the Governor was selling commissions, Bell 
proclaimed broadcast, and over the Bates House bar, and, in 
the language of the barbarian and savage of that time, 
avowed his personal responsibility to any man who might 
feel aggrieved at his statements.^ The fact that no man in 
those days wanted to fight with Horace Bell, although to do 
so would be to espouse the cause of the second strongest 
man in the nation — for such then was Oliver P. Morton 
— does not necessarily verify Bell's statements. It was due 
to Indiana's War Governor that Mr. Lincoln very properly 
removed General Don Carlos Buell, and in forensic ability 
my husband rated Governor — afterwards Senator — Mor- 
ton as second to no man who had appeared since Webster's 
time. But often what is said is as important as what is 
done. This much I will quote from Horace Bell: "Your 
husband denounced the Governor for deceiving him into 
resigning a commission in an active regiment in the field 
for a commission in a paper organization. 'You can't keep 
me out of the field in this way, and expenses will not stand 
in the way of the organization of the new regiment.'" 

Mr. Slaughter, Samuel J. Wright, Dr. Slemmons of 
Corydon, and Peter R. Stoy of New Albany, helped my 
husband bear the expenses of the organization of the Fifty- 
third, and the breach between the Governor and my husband 
widened. Bell continued in the service of the National 
government to the close of the war, and achieved distinc- 
tion and honorable mention as a "scout." There was not 
enough hazard for him in the field. He was one of the men 
who went through the South visiting the Confederate armies 

iSee page 183. 



I70 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

and reporting at intervals to Mr. Stanton and Mr. Lincoln.^ 

We had a few happy days at Cory don. Various places 
were visited to make speeches for the purpose of encouraging 
enlistments. The fact that my husband had been in the 
service induced parents to trust their boys — for most of the 
recruits were mere boys — to him rather than to the many 
political appointees. He declined at this time to consider 
the offer of a nomination for Congress, because, if elected, 
he did not propose to leave the field until the war was ended. 
Samuel J. Wright was the enrolling officer of our district. 
He would get up the meetings, and then my husband would 
make a speech on the necessity of preserving the integrity 
of the Union. Meetings were held as far north as Bedford, 
the county seat of Lawrence County. A master of denun- 
ciation and invective, Colonel Gresham scored the traitor, 
but still disclaimed being an Abolitionist, and reminded the 
people of the speeches he had made in every campaign since 
1854, as evidence of the position he had taken and the 
government was then taking, that their object was only to 
preserve the Union. At the end of a speech a number al- 
ways came forward and enrolled their names as members of 
the new regiment. 

January 10, 1862, headquarters were established at the 
fair grounds in New Albany. It was still called Camp Noble. 

I again went to New Albany and, notwithstanding the 
winter weather, made a few visits to the camp. The "Bar- 
racks," as the fair ground buildings were called, the horse 
stalls, and the tents were poor protection in winter time. 
Drilling was done in the large halls designed only for occu- 
pancy in summer time. 

It is not to be wondered at that sickness soon appeared. 
Measles, the deadly enemy of the seventeen- and eighteen- 
year-old recruit, soon confronted them. Many were in the 
hospitals before the regiment was formally organized. 

Thus passed January and February down to the 2 2d, 

1 See page 183. 



FIFTY -THIRD INDIANA VOLUNTEERS 171 

when the Fifty-third was mustered into the service. En- 
Hstments were not as rapid as had been expected and as 
desired, so on the 26th of February the Sixty-second Indiana 
Vokmteers, which was being recruited and organized at 
Rockport, Indiana, was brought to New Albany and con- 
soHdated with the Fifty-third. 

My husband was now coloneL WilHam Jones was made 
the Heutenant-colonel, Roger Martin the major, and my 
brother, Thomas McGrain, Jr., the adjutant. Up to that 
time my brother had hstened to the counsels of my father 
against entering the army. Satisfied it was not a war of 
abolition, and having a military education, he could no 
longer resist the pressure which was being exerted on men 
of his class to take up arms, in defense, as it was said, of the 
integrity of the Union. 

Colonel Jones was killed in battle on July 22, 1864, and 
Major Martin .soon resigned. On April 17, 1862, my 
brother, at the almost unanimous request of the officers of 
the regiment, was commissioned major of the regiment, and 
held that position until he left the service. May 11, 1863. 
Had he stayed in the army and not been killed, it was the 
consensus of opinion that he was fitted for, and was designed 
for, a higher position. But he could not stand the Eman- 
cipation Proclamation. Many others were like him, but 
few were so outspoken. He freely said that he did not enlist 
for the purpose of "fighting to free the niggers." 

To have to fight to get into the army, then fight and 
help pay his way to stay there, that the special interests of 
that time should not control the government, gave Walter 
Q. Gresham the right which he exercised to protest against 
the government of the United States being administered in 
the '8o's and 'go's in the interest of the special interests of 
those years. But be this as it may, my husband did not 
hesitate to separate himself from men like Chauncey M. 
Depew, who in our body politic represented certain special 
interests. During the war my husband repeatedly said, 



172 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

"What my future political course shall be, will depend on 
the exigencies of the times." 

Instead of starting for the front at first, as the mem- 
bers of the Fifty-third desired, the regiment was ordered 
to Camp Morton, at Indianapolis, to guard part of the 
prisoners captured at Fort Donelson. Later it went to St. 
Louis and thence via the Mississippi, Ohio, and Tennessee 
rivers to join General Grant at Savannah, Tennessee. Its 
movements can best be told by some of the letters I 
received at this time. 

Headquarters, 53D Indiana Volunteers, 

Camp Morton, March i, 1862 

I have been too busy even to drop you a line since I left New 
Albany. We had a terrible time getting up here. The super- 
intendent of the Jeffersonville & Indianapolis Railroad had not 
made the necessary arrangements to transport the Fifty-third 
here (Indianapolis), and the consequence was that I had to crowd 
the boys into hay cars, with no fire, and it was very cold. I was 
up all night and the following night; but it never even tired me. 
We are now getting things in shape and I am drilling the boys 
all the time, in order to get them in condition to leave. There 
are about 1,500 troops here, all told, guarding the prisoners, 
who number 4,000. They are from Kentucky, Tennessee, and 
Mississippi. A large majority of them are clamorous to take 
the oath. They say they have been deceived and that they are 
Union men. Many of them are in earnest and many of them 
are not. I have but little patience for the work, and unless we 
leave here soon, I intend to resign. The Governor says we will 
be here but a short time. 

Camp Morton, Indiana, 

March 9, 1862 

I described our situation to you in my last letter. Since then 
the weather has been better, but it is now (Sunday evening) 
raining again. Owing to our exposure in coming here and the 
heavy guard duty we have had to perform, our men have suffered 
severely from sickness. The health of the camp is now improving. 
I have had a slight touch of mv old disease since we arrived here, 



FIFTY-THIRD INDIANA VOLUNTEERS 173 

but it was nothin<f in compcirison with fonner attacks. I am 
now well. 

Can't say how long we will be here, Init I hope not long. The 
Secesh are getting fat and sleek. They get the same rations our 
men get. They all say they fare better here than they did even 
in Dixie 

Planters Hotel, St. Louis, 

March 15, 1862 

We left Indianapolis yesterday evening and arrived here to- 
day about 2 p. M. I immediately reported to General Halleck for 
orders, and he informed me that I would proceed by steamer to 
join General Grant. I got my men aboard the McDowell this 
afternoon, but the boat for some cause or other will not leave 
till to-morrow. 

We will be in the column that moves down the Mississippi. 
Fortunate, are we not'" I was rejoiced at the idea of leaving 
Indianapolis. In fact, I kept up such a fuss ivith the Governor that 
he was anxious to get rid of us. 

We are all armed with the long-range Enfield rifle. We are 
prepared for good work, and if I am not very much mistaken we 
will soon have it to do. It looks just now as though the Rebels 
would soon be compelled to sue for peace, but I don't expect to be 
at home for some time yet. Certainly there is nothing in life half 
so pleasant to me as the comforts of my happy home, the society 
of my wife and children, but I must forego all these pleasures for 
the present and battle for my country. I don't apprehend any 
danger myself, but if anything should happen me, I deliver you 
and the little ones over to a kind Providence. But there is no 
occasion for me to speak in that strain, for I expect to spend many, 
many years with you yet. 

My men have suffered terribly ever since leaving New Albany, 
and their suffering is not yet over. Yesterday we were in the rain 
all day, and now they are huddled together as thick as cattle. 
Their condition distresses me not a little. 

Can't say exactly what our destination is, but think we are 
going to Tennessee. I will try and keep you advised of our 
whereabouts. You can write me at Nashville, Fort Henry, and 
Cairo, and the letters will be forwarded. . . . 
12 



174 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

Mississippi River, On Board Steamer 
"McDowell," 20 Miles above Cairo, 

March 16, 1S62 

I wrote you yesterday morning from St. Louis that we were 
under marching orders for Tennessee. I know nothing more 
about our destination now than I did then. My orders are to 
report to General Grant and I don't know where he is. We will 
stop at Fort Henry long enough to get our wagons and then I 
think we will join some brigade that is marching south. 

We have twelve new cases of measles since yesterday. We 
will put off all the sick at Cairo or Mound City. My only fear is 
that the men are going to suffer from sickness, for they have been 
terribly exposed for a week. My health was never better. 

Paducah, Kentucky, 

March 18, 1862 

We arrived here last night and have been detained for some 
time by the discharging of freight. We start up the Tennessee 
this morning for Fort Henry. We will get our wagons and then 
go on to Savannah, where we are concentrating a strong force. It 
is said we have 50,000 men there now. We put off twenty men 
here who took sick after leaving St. Louis — the measles are dimin- 
ishing my men fast. . . . 



CHAPTER XII 
THE BATTLE OF SHILOH 



FIRST MEETING WITH GENERAL GRANT — GRESHAM COM- 
MANDS POST AND BRIGADE AT SAVANNAH GRANT's ARMY 

WORSTED BUT NOT DEFEATED IN FIRST DAY's FIGHT GRANT 

PROTECTS SHERMAN GRANT RELIEVED OF HIS COMMAND 

RAWLINS' SECRET REPORTS CAUSE MR. LINCOLN TO RE- 
STORE GRANT TO COMMAND — COURT MARTIAL OF COLONEL 
WORTHINGTON. 

'T^HE letters from Savannah, written before the battle of 
-■- Shiloh, tend at least to establish what was General 
Grant's plan, and that even a newcomer like the Colonel 
of the Fifty-third Indiana Volunteers was admitted to the 
confidence of the Commander-in-Chief. Secretive as Gen- 
eral Grant was in military matters, at that time he had all 
of his cards face up on the table. His headquarters were 
at Savannah on the north side of the Tennessee River. At 
Pittsburg Landing, or Shiloh, ten miles up the river on the 
south side, was the constantly increasing Army of the Ten- 
nessee. The plan, contrary to the opinion of the critics, 
and the then accepted axioms of war, was to fight south of 
the river. Moreover, these letters indicate that General 
Grant was boldly ignoring Commander-in-Chief Halleck 
at St. Louis and the War Department at Washington, for 
Halleck's instructions were to retreat rather than risk a 
general battle. The grasp General Grant then exhibited 
in the teeth of the incompetency of Halleck and the in- 
efficiency in the War Department stamped him, at least 
in the eyes of one of his subordinates, as a man of force 
and genius. The criticism has been made that General 
Grant had no arrangements for a retreat in the event of 

1/5 



176 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

defeat. Defeat was not contemplated. These letters and 
some verbal statements which I will quote, make it clear 
that Colonel Gresham, like the great mass of the men who 
made up General Grant's army, believed then and ever 
afterwards in General Grant's plan. In other words. 
Grant's followers started out for the Gulf, and they believed 
in him because he proposed to show them the way. 

The existence of the spirit or purpose of the volunteer, 
which General Grant, alone of all the Union commanders, 
seems to have divined, and which justified his plan, is re- 
vealed in these letters. On page 356 of volume i of his 
"Memoirs," General Grant said: 

He, General Buell, a strict disciplinarian, perhaps did not 
distinguish sufficiently between the volunteer who enlisted for 
the war, and the soldier who served in time of peace. One 
system embraced men who risked life ^or principle and often 
men of professional and official standing, competence or wealth, 
and independence of character. The other includes, as a rule, 
only men who could not do as well in any other occupation. 

I quote several letters written to me by Colonel Gresham 
at this period: 

Savannah, Tenn., 
March 20, 1862 

We arrived here last night and are now disembarking to go 
into camp. We have had a long and tedious trip and the men 
have suifered severely from measles. My orders this morning 
were to proceed up the river ten miles further, but General Grant 
countermanded that order, in consequence of the health of the 
men. We will remain here a few days. 

We have a large army here and the Rebels are in force at 
Corinth, Mississippi, some fifteen miles distant. 

By reference to the map you will see that we are really oper- 
ating against Memphis. The big fight will come off up here, but 
not short of ten days, I think, unless the Rebels bring it on. The 
Union feeling here seems to be strong. 

We have spring here in all her loveliness. The grass is green, 



THE BATTLE OF SHILOH 177 

flowers in bloom, and the vvoods full of birds. The sun is now 
shining, making it rather uncomfortably warm. Tom is very 
well and my health is fine. . . . 

Savannah, Tenn., 

March 20, 1862 
I have an opportunity to drop you another line. I wrote this 
morning from the McDowell. We are this evening in camp 
doing verv well. You will see by the map that we are about due 
east of Memphis, and you will also see that there is a railroad 
rtmning from A-IemiDhis, through Tuscumbia to Richmond. That 
road is a short distance south of us. We will take possession of 
it next week, and in doing that, we will have the big fight. To- 
morrow we commence drilling in earnest. . . . 

Savannah, Tenn., 

March 22, 1862 

A boat leaves here this evening, and I have an opportunity 
to send you another line. I have not heard a word from home 
since leaving Indianapolis, and you may imagine how anxious I 
am to know how you and the children are getting along. 

The weather is not as good now as when I wrote you last 
(day before yesterday). We are having equinoctial storms, and 
I suppose you are having winter. Yesterday and to-day would 
pass for good March days in Hoosier. 

I can't say how long we will be here. We have measles and 
mumps, and they are a great impediment in a regiment. General 
Grant says my men must rest a while before doing any work. 
He does n't require us to furnish a detail for guards. I am putting 
in every minute on the drill, so that my men may be in condition 
to do something. I think in ten days from now we will be all right 
again. . . . 

Savannah, Tenn., 
March 24, 1862 

I have written you almost every day since we left Indianap- 
olis, and have not yet received a line from you or any one else from 
Hoosier. 

The health of the Fifty-third is now imj^roving, but we have 
still over two hundred sick men. One died vesterday. We have 



1 78 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

measles and mumps too. Major Martin is now down with the 
mumps. . . . 

The force up here is very large, and still they come. The 
Rebels are reinforcing from Virginia, which they can do very 
easily by rail. 

Unless the Rebels retreat there will be a big battle in the next 
two weeks. There is no doubt about the result. 

General Grant put me in command of the brigade at this 
place this morning. It consists of my own regiment, one from 
Illinois, and one from Missouri, and a squadron of cavalry. 

The further south I go the more I am satisfied that slavery 
destroys the life, energy, and enterprise of the people. If slavery 
existed in every State of the Union, we would as a nation be 
miserably sluggish and stupid. It is the spirit, intelligence, and 
enterprise of the people of tlie Free States that give us any char- 
acter as a nation. Outside the towns in the South the people 
are a century behind the Free States. . . . 

Savannah, Tenn., 
March 29, 1862 

I will continue to write though I have not yet heard a word 
from home since leaving Indianapolis. I am very anxious to hear 
from you, for I don't know what condition you and the children 
are in. . . . 

I have just returned from Pittsburg, ten miles above here. 
It is my misfortune to be caught up on court martials wherever I 
go. I am on a court now, and we are trying a Missourian for 
"conduct unbecoming a soldier and a gentleman." 

I have command at this place. My brigade consists of three 
regiments of infantry and three companies of cavalry. My du- 
ties as commander of the post, added to my other duties, keep 
me trotting all day. I would not have so much to do if my 
lieutenant-colonel and major understood their duties, so that 
I could divide the labor. I continue with Tom's aid to drill 
my own regiment. Tom drills the officers. The boys are im- 
proving in health. I think they will be in good condition in 
two weeks. 

Can't say when the big fight will come off. We are getting 
ready for it. . . . 



THE BATTLE OF SHILOH 179 

Savannah, Tenn., 

April 3, 1862 

I received two letters from you the other day, one directed 
to me at Indianapolis, and the other at Nashville. They were a 
little old, but coming from home they were interesting. It was 
a great relief to me to know you and the children were well. 

My health continues good. Even at times when almost the 
entire regiment was more or less affected with colds or some other 
sickness, I retained my health and vigor. In the army much 
depends on one's will. Many men die from faint-heartedness. 
They become slightly indisposed in the first place, then imagine 
they are much worse than they really are, get homesick, the sys- 
tem becomes relaxed, and a general prostration follows. Then 
again I see some men who fight disease valiantly, never give up, 
and when they are in a manner gone, they seem as it were to be 
struggling with death. In other words, the physical man is all 
gone, and the will is still hanging on. 

The health of the Fifty-third is improving, although we have 
lost several men and must lose several more. You will observe 
we are still at the same place that we were when I wrote you last. 
I have command of three regiments of infantry and a squadron 
of cavalry. 

Am very well pleased with my own regiment. Am weeding 
it out now. I forced two captains to resign last night. They 
are incoriipetent and I determined to be bothered with them no 
longer. I can't have a good regiment without good company 
officers, and I am determined the Fifty-third shall be A No. i. 

Captain Long makes an efficient officer. Andrew Jones is 
now second lieutenant in his company and he makes a most 
capital officer. He is a good boy and a fine soldier. Tom is 
my mainstay in the regiment. He is well drilled and very handy 
at everything. In a short time he will be one of the best officers 
in the service. Major Martin is getting up again. I think he 
will do very well when he gets a start. 

It is evident that the fate of the Mississippi Valley will to a 
great extent be determined by that fight that will come off at 
Corinth. I think the Rebels will fight at that point, but there 
is no telling what they will do. If they are driven from their 
position up here, of which I have no doubt, Memphis must fall. 



i8o LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

The weather is quite warm and summer-hke here. The 
trees are all putting out, the woods are beginning to look green. 
This would be nice weather for us to make garden, if I were at 
home, but next spring will do as well, I hope. 

General Grant has sent for a paymaster for my regiment, but 
he may not get here for weeks, so you had better get some money 
from Mr. Slaughter to supply your wants. Don't stint yourself 
too much. I can afford to do that better than you can. 

vSavannah, Tennessee, 

April 8, 1862 

You will hear about the great battle at Pittsburg long before 
this reaches you. The Rebels attacked our forces about 5 o'clock 
Sunday morning, with determination and spirit. The battle 
raged fiercely all day Sunday, and at dark we were worsted but 
were not defeated. Sunday evening Buell's forces commenced 
arriving, and by Monday morning 25,000 of them were on the 
ground for the fight. The contest was waged with much spirit 
all day yesterday, but with the help of General Buell's men the 
enemy was driven off the field. 

The fight was renewed on our left this morning, but the ene- 
my gave way, and the news now is that he has fallen back on 
Corinth. 

We have lost in killed and wounded from 8,000 to 10,000 
men, and it may even be greater. Almost every house in this 
town is filled with wounded. The Rebels suffered more than we 
did. Their loss is estimated at not less than 15,000 killed and 
wounded. 

It is the greatest battle that has ever been fought on this 
continent, and what is worst of all to me, I was not in the fight. 
When the battle commenced Sunday morning, General Grant was 
here, and I at once went and asked permission to go up with my 
regiment, and his reply was that I was in command of the post and 
it was no time to make any change. He said I must remain here 
and superintend the forwarding of reinforcements. I feel miserable 
beyond description, but I can't help it. It seems as if bad luck 
attends me. Am busy day and night here now. 

General Wallace of Illinois is now in my room mortally 
wounded. He will die to-night. His wife is with him. 



THE BATTLE OF SHILOH i8i 

vSavannah, Tenn., 

April 12, '1862 

I wrote you after the battle and I hope you have received 
the letter before this, for no doubt you will be somewhat uneasy 
thinking the Fifty-third had a part in the fight. 

You can have no conception of the amount of suffering here. 
Men lie out in stables, and die without having their wounds 
dressed. I have afforded the surgeons every facility for taking 
care of the wounded, but they are inefficient. They all seem to 
have a mania for cutting off arms and legs, and in that way pay no 
attention to the general management of the hospitals. 

We have had confusion confounded here for a week. Gen- 
eral Buell's army hurried ahead, leaving wagons, sick, etc., behind, 
— all of which is now here without commanders or anything else. 
I have organized the masses the best I could, and put officers 
selected for the time over them, and in that manner got them 
something to eat. 

General Grant has sent me word that I would be taken away 
from here in a few days. My regiment stands higher for good 
conduct and discipline than any other regiment in the division. 

There will evidently be another big fight up here soon. If 
the Rebels are driven from the line of the railroads now they are 
gone up. We will soon clean them out. 

I will give you an honest account of the casualties of the 
battle. We have lost in killed over 2,000 men, in wounded 5,000, 
prisoners 3,000. That is too small, if out of the way at all. The 
enemy's loss is: killed 3,500, wounded 6,000, prisoners goo. If 
this is out of the way it is in being too small. 

Savannah, Tenn., 

April 20, 1862 
The great battle ceases to be a subject of interest here. The 
question now is. Where will we have another"' It is hard to tell 
what Beauregard intends to do. I sometimes think he is going to 
retreat and fall back on' some point further south. There is one 
thing certain now, and that is, he can't whip the Union army. 
After a few more decisive battles, the Rebels will be apt to dis- 
perse in small guerrilla bands and attempt to worry us that way. 
I am curious to know what your father thinks of the prospects of 



i82 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

the Secesh now. Does he still think we have been whipped every 
time; and if he does, how does he explain the fact that we are way 
down here in the heart of Dixie? I wonder if he will admit now 

that the Abolitionists, as he calls us, will fight. . . . 

Supplementary to what is said in the letter of April 8, 
about asking permission "to go up with my regiment," one 
of my husband's stories, told with much detail, was that 
he made a second appeal to General Grant to let him go to 
Pittsburg Landing. "I followed General Grant to the boat 
that was always ready to take him to Pittsburg and renewed 
my request to go up. His answer was: 'You can't go; 
all my plans are made; you are in command here and 
must remain here. But you must urge on General Buell 
and his men to push forward.'" 

As to the charge that General Grant had been drinking 
for ten days prior to April 5, my husband always main- 
tained this was not true. Mornings and all hours of the 
night he reported to General Grant, from March 20 to the 
Sunday morning they were startled by the firing at Pitts- 
burg Landing, and never during that time was there any 
trace of strong drink on or about General Grant. Further- 
more, that charge must have been refuted to the satisfac- 
tion of Mr. Lincoln. Every officer who had come in con- 
tact with General Grant at this time was required to make 
a written statement as to when and where and under what 
circumstances he had seen him for the ten days prior to 
the battle. Without conclusions and opinions of any kind, 
and with no reference to the rdport, the details as to when 
and where General Grant was met and seen during this 
period were so complete that there was only one conclusion 
for the man to draw who read them. It was understood 
that these reports were to go to Mr. Lincoln. They were 
drafted pursuant to the directions of John A. Rawlins, 
Lincoln's close friend. The reports never saw the hght 
of day. But they must have been conclusive, for, although 
the newspapers kept on with their charges against General 



THE BATTLE OF SHILOH 183 

Grant, he was restored to his command. Rawlins was then 
a colonel on General Grant's staff. His biography has been 
in manuscript form for years, and when it is published it will 
reveal him as one of the strongest characters of the war.i 
Another story my husband told frequently was that 
General Grant had a day or two before the attack ordered 
General Sherman in writing to advance his pickets, in order 
to guard against a surprise. This vSherman failed to do. 
But recovering himself, wSherman fought so valiantly the 
balance of the day, holding the right flank of the army 
south of the bridge across Snake Creek, across which 
Lew Wallace came after nightfall, against the repeated 
assaults of the Confederates, that Grant protected Sherman 
by deliberately suppressing the order. Rawlins and Mc- 
Pherson never pardoned Wallace for his delay in getting on 
the field, but General Grant, before his death, modified his 
criticism of Wallace. It was quite right for Grant to pro- 
tect Sherman for ignoring Halleck and the War Depart- 
ment, for Grant had ordered Sherman up the Tennessee 
River and Sherman had obeyed. Should these two orders 
ever be published, they will be an interesting contribution 
to the real history of the war. By his scouts and spies 
General Grant kept posted as to the movements of the Con- 
federate army. It is of record that Horace Bell rode out 
of Corinth with Hardee's advices, broke away, and reached 
Lew Wallace's headquarters two days before Sherman was 
surprised.- 

Colonel Thomas Worthington of the Forty-sixth Ohio 
was a son of an early Ohio governor. General Sherman 
says in his "Memoirs" that Colonel Worthington was a grad- 
uate of West Point of the class of 1825, and thought he 
knew more about how the war should be conducted than 
Grant, Sherman, and all the rest of them. But General 
Sherman does not tell all the story. In the early Summer 
of 1862, Colonel Worthington, in a pamphlet that was 

1 See Chapter XXIX, especially pages 463 and 464. 2 See paye 169. 



i84 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

widely distributed, charged that General Sherman was sur- 
prised at Shiloh. This, according to my husband, "was 
just the course that General Sherman preferred Colonel 
Worthington should take. It enabled General Sherman to 
arrest Colonel Worthington and try him by court martial. 
The charges and arrest were what Colonel Worthington 
expected and wished for, as he anticipated it would enable 
him to prove the facts as to the surprise and the existence 
of General Grant's order to General Sherman. A bright 
old army officer, Colonel Worthington was no lawyer. 
He did not appreciate that he would be tried for insub- 
ordination and that the truth of his charges was no justifi- 
cation for attacking his superior officer in the public press. 
The course Colonel Worthington should have taken was to 
prefer charges against his superior officer and thus have 
raised the question of surprise fairly and legitimately." 

The court martial sat at Memphis in August, 1862. 
It was composed of Brigadier-General S. A. Hurlbut, com- 
manding the Fourth Division; Brigadier-General Denver, 
Third Brigade, Fifth Division; Brigadier-General Veatch, 
Second Brigade, Fourth Division; Colonel Logan, Thirty- 
second Illinois Infantry; Colonel Mungen, Fifty-seventh 
Ohio Infantry; Colonel Gresham, Fifty-third Indiana In- 
fantry; Colonel Sullivan, Forty-eighth Ohio Infantry; Col- 
onel Grierson, Sixth Illinois Cavalry, and Captain James 
C. McCoy, A. D. C, Judge Advocate. Colonel Worthing- 
ton was found guilty and was dropped from the rolls by 
an order of October i, 1862. The order was revoked Jan- 
uary 8, 1867, and it was then ordered that he should be 
honorably discharged from the service of the United States, 
upon tender of resignation, to date November 21, 1862. 

Speaking of the trial, my husband said that the first 
objection made on behalf of Colonel Worthington, and ar- 
gued out, was that General Sherman should not be permit- 
ted both to prefer the charges and name the court. "/ was 
the only member of the court to vote to sustain the objection;^ 
it seemed to me then, and has seemed ever since, contrary 

1 See page 159. 



THE BATTLE OF SHI L OH 185 

to our institutions to allow the accuser to name the court to 
try the accused. Other members of the court were lawyers 
by profession and must have known better than to vote 
to overrule the challenge." There is not a reference in any 
of the biographies or in the Rebellion Records to this 
trial. General Sherman was a witness before the court. 
In the course of his testimony, he said, according to 
Colonel Gresham and General vSherman: 

"General Grant during the battle rode over to where 
I was and said, 'How is it going?' 'Bad enough, bad 
enough.' But looking at Grant and finding him so unper- 
turbed, I took fresh hope. Grant said, 'We will hold our 
own, keeping the enemy at bay the balance of the day. 
At night the enemy will be in possession of our camp and 
in no shape to resist an early attack in the morning, when 
we will pounce on them and drive them pell mell.'" 

I have met many Confederate cavalrymen, among them 
"Private John" M. Allen of Mississippi, who watered their 
horses in the Tennessee River the afternoon of the first day, 
but as Colonel Gresham said, "John, it was up the river 
towards the mouth of Lick Creek, four miles above the 
mouth of Snake Creek." At the time of this conversation 
John M. Allen was a member of Congress. "The first time 
I saw greenbacks,"' said "Private John," "was that early 
morning in General Sherman's deserted camp. We con- 
sidered them shin -plasters and not worth carrying off." 

To his dying day Walter Q. Gresham believed General 
Grant's plan, without the aid of a single man of Buell's 
army, would have succeeded on the second day's battle. 
General Grant's action in reorganizing his army under 
fire, as it were, and his magnanimity to General Sherman 
satisfied his subordinates that his leadership was invincible. 
George R. Peck, a distinguished lawyer, who served in 
another army than either the Army of the Tennessee or the 
Army of the Cumberland, was of the opinion that because 
Walter Q. Gresham was not in the battle of Shiloh his 
conclusions and the reasons that supported them should 
be made a matter of record. 

1 See Chapter XXVII, page 420. 



CHAPTER XIII 
CORINTH AND MEMPHIS 



siege and evacuation of corinth memphis evac- 
uated general grant opens up vicksburg campaign 

Sherman's movement down the river — fourth of july 
IN the confederacy — gresham does the talking — 

ROBERT dale OWEN's LETTER TO SECRETARY CHASE ON 

ABOLITION INTERNAL CONDITIONS IN GRANT's ARMY- — HOW 

ABOLITIONISM WAS BROUGHT ABOUT — AT COLLIERVILLE — 
GRESHAM DEVELOPS TYPHOID — RIFT BETWEEN GRESHAM 
AND GOVERNOR MORTON WIDENED. 

GENERAL Grant says in his "Memoirs" (page 376), 
"On the 30th of April the Grand Army commenced its 
advance on Corinth." General Halleck was in command, 
while General Grant, who had not yet been restored to the 
position for which nature had fitted him, constituted a 
sort of fifth wheel to the wagon. The Grand Army was 
composed of the right wing, the Army of the Tennessee, 
commanded by General George H. Thomas; the center, 
the Army of the Ohio, under General Buell; and the left 
wing, the Army of the Mississippi, led by General Pope. 
The Fifty-third Indiana Volunteers was on the left of 
General Hurlbut's division, the fourth of the Seventeenth 
army corps, which was the extreme right of the right wing 
or the Army of the TenneSvSee. 

At this time my husband wrote me from the field as 
follows : 

Pittsburg, Tenn., 
April 25, 1862 

The last time I wrote we were under marchinf]; orders to this 
place. We came out here twelve miles from Corinth yesterday. 

186 



CORINTH AND MEMPHIS 187 

We disembarked at Pittsburg Landing early in the morning, and 
took the rain and mud. You can have very Httle idea of a march 
over bad roads, and in the rain. I was in the rain all day and 
now feel better than I have for a week. 

We are on the front line in the advance, so you may safely 
count on our being in the next fight. I asked permission to bring 
my regiment to the front and now we must behave well. 



Fields of Shiloh, 

April 29, 1862 

We received news of the fall of New Orleans yesterday, and 
when the boys were told the glad tidings, on dress parade, it would 
have done you good to have heard those hearty cheers. 

In the Field, 

May 3, 1862 

We are now camped on a high ridge, affording a fine view 
over into Mississippi. We are still in the advance. The other 
day I met General Sherman, the man who was in command in 
Kentucky. He was very cordial. I wanted to get in his division 
and he was anxious for it himself, but we were not able to 
make the arrangement. 



Camp in the Fields, 
Five and a Half Miles from Corinth, 

May 10, 1862 

We have been moving so much for the last week that I have 
had little or no opportunity to write. We were ordered to be 
ready at 8 o'clock Sunday morning with four days' cooked rations 
in our haversacks. The time arrived and the Fifty-third was 
ready in line to march, but we were delayed by other divisions 
till nearly 11 o'clock, at which time it had commenced to rain. 
Such another day I never saw. The heavens seemed to have 
opened and the water descended in torrents. You can imagine 
what condition the roads in a swampy country would be in after 
thousands of wagons and horses and heavy artillery had passed 



i88 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

over them. We tramped along all day. Sometimes the mud 
was so deep that my line would mire. I let the men select the best 
ground they could, but they were mostly in mud from half leg 
to knee deep. 

We camped about dark — that is, we bivouaced for the night, 
without tents or anything else, and took the rain. It rained 
incessantly all night, or more properly speaking, poured down all 
night. I took it for twenty hours without any covering, not 
even a gum blanket. I was just as wet as one could be made, 
and continued so until my clothes dried on my back. What is 
strange to me, I stood it all finely, and can really believe it did me 
good. I have been well ever since, so you see that what I have 
always told you, that " I am hard as iron," is true. 

Tom stood the march well, and he is now —I almost said as 
ugly as ever, but I have no. advantages over him in that way, for 
I am almost as black as any half-breed in Tennessee. 

We are now close to Corinth; their pickets are in sight, and 
we are hourly expecting the order to go forward. Halleck is 
approaching slowly and cautiously; he doesn't intend to be sur- 
prised. Some think the Rebels will evacuate Corinth, but I do 
not. They are bound to fight now, or "give up the ghost." I 
feel confident we will whip them. We are on the extreme left of 
General Hurlbut's division, a point of danger and honor, and we 
intend to do our duty. What is very strange to me is the fact 
that the closer we get to the enemy the less apprehensions I have. 
So far as danger is concerned, I feel now just about the same way 
that I would at home with you and the children. 

I am in earnest when I say that it looks as if the war was fast 
drawing to a close. McClellan has taken Yorktown and I think 
Richmond by this time. We have New Orleans, and when the 
enemy is driven from Corinth, what can they do? Deserters are 
constantly coming in, and they concur in the statement that the 
Rebel army is getting out of heart. They have been driven so 
much that they are now beginning to believe the Union army is 
invincible. 

I think we will leave here to-night or to-morrow morning; 
likely in the morning, for Sunday is always a march day. I have 
not had a letter from you for a long time. Write often for nothing 
affords me greater pleasure than to hear from my wife and baby. 



CORINTH AND MEMPHIS 189 

In the Field, 
May 13, 1862 
Up in line of battle at 4 o'clock in the morning. The pickets 
are banging away at each other all the time. Some one is killed 
every day. Within the next week I think we will certainly know 
which of the two contending armies is the superior. Our army 
is full of spirit and determination. If the enemy whips us they will 
do harder fighting than they ever have done. Yet they must not 
whip us. We can't afford to be whipped down here. We teach 
the men it is victory or death, for we could never retreat. 

On the Picket Line, 

May 20, 1862 
Two companies' captains — Long and Daily — deployed along 
the brow of a hill. The enemy was in the brush just at the foot 
of the hill, distant about 150 to 250 yards. Young Adams of 
Company "B" of Clark County fell, mortally wounded. He died 
in less than an hour. From letters and a photograph we found on 
his body, we learned that he was engaged to be married. General 
Hurlbut then sent forward a battery supported by our brigade and 
we drove the enemy off. Last night we slept on our arms, ready 
for an attack. We could hear the cars moving and departing 
from Corinth just as distinctly as if we had been there. 

May 22, 1862 
We drove the enemy's rear guard in. 

May 25, 1862 
Some think the Rebels will not fight at Corinth. I think 
they will, and perhaps more desperately than they have any time 
yet. 

May 27, 1862 

It is not yet quite light. We are under arms every morning 
from 3 to 4 o'clock. Frequently we are in line at 3 o'clock in 
the morning and remain in that position till after daylight. We 
have warm days and cold nights. 

This is a miserable country. I have not seen a church (except- 
ing Shiloh Church on the battle field) or a schoolhouse since we 
left the Tennessee River. That of itself is enough to give you 

13 



igo LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

some idea of the character of the people of Northern Mississippi. 
The country is not so poor, for we have passed many fine cotton 
farms, but slavery and intelligence never go together, and that 
accounts for the whole thing. 

Headquarters, 53D Indiana Volunteers 

Near Corinth, May 31, 1862 
Well, Corinth is evacuated at last! We ascertained yesterday 
morning that the enemy had skedaddled, and it was not long 
until I had ocular proof of the correctness of the report. In com- 
pany with half a dozen officers, I rode over the earthwork^, and 
went into the famous stronghold of Beauregard. There is no 
doubt about the strength of the enemy's position— the breast- 
works extended around in a semicircle for miles and miles. We 
rode for hours, and did not then get around them. At places it 
seemed that we never could have made any headway, for the 
works are thrown up in such a manner that we would have been 
forced to march over swamps and fallen trees, and all the time 
under the enemy's fire. His weakest position was immediately 
in our front, the right wing. We could have taken the works in 
front of us by storm, and we would have done it the day we 
marched out and engaged the enemy, if we had not been held 
back. 

I wrote you yesterday about our work the day before, when 
we had two men killed and two wounded. Well, where we stopped 
Thursday night and threw up our breastworks is not more than 
six hundred yards from the Rebel breastworks. I thought that 
day, and so told General Veatch, that we ought to go further, but 
he was fearful of falling into a trap, and then he was acting under 
orders himself. I was, as the boys sometimes say, keen for a fight 
that day. As it was, we had a right sharp little battle. 

I will now go on with a description of my journey to Corinth. 
We left the line of earthworks, which average a mile and a half 
from Corinth, and rode into town, finding it almost deserted, few 
families remaining. It is a town of some twelve hundred inhabit- 
ants, judging from appearances, and the most lovely looking vil- 
lage I ever saw. The town is new, being built up in the small oak 
timber, which affords fine shade. Then the yards and gardens 
are spacious and beautiful beyond anything I have ever seen in a 



CORINTH AND MEMPHIS 191 

small town. Many of the homes are models. But then, the 
terrible ravages of war have destroyed the comfort and happiness 
of that hitherto quiet and gay Mississippi town. 

As I approached the railroad I began to see evidence of the 
destruction of property that always follows the retreat of the 
Rebel army. All the railroad property, such as depots, machine 
shops, etc., were burning. Close by was a large quantity of cot- 
ton, still burning. 

Where the Rebels have gone we can't tell. We learn that the 
army divided, the greater portion retreating south; the balance 
went in the direction of Grand Junction and Memphis. I suppose 
we will follow. It seems to be understood in the camp that the 
right wing of our army will go to Mempliis. I hope that is true, 
but I don't know that it is. 

June 6, 1862, Memphis was evacuated, as it was antici- 
pated it would be in the event of the success of the expedi- 
tion to Corinth; or as my husband had stated to me in 
the letter of March 20, from Savannah, in the event of the 
success of the attempt to take possession of the Memphis 
& Charleston Railroad. But instead of the Grand Army 
of 120,000 men marching immediately on Vicksburg, as 
General Grant says in his "Memoirs " it should have done on 
the fall of Corinth, leaving only enough men to garrison 
Corinth, General Halleck divided it up. 

Fortunately for the cause of the Union, General Halleck 
on July 17 went to Washington as commander-in-chief, 
while General Grant was restored to the position of com- 
mander in the field. 

"The most anxious period of the war to me," said Gen- 
eral Grant ("Memoirs," page 395), "w^as during the time the 
Army of the Tennessee was guarding the territory acquired 
by the fall of Corinth and Memphis, and before I was 
sufficiently reinforced to take the offensive." General Grant 
tells us his troops were so disposed that he might move 
them from one point to another to reinforce as the occasion 
might require, and that there was much fighting, marching 



192 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

and countermarching, which was little noticed outside of 
the army. 

The following are letters from the field at this period: 

In Camp near Grand Junction, 

June 2 1, 1862 

I have but little time to write. Yi3u can see by referring to 
the map that we are about midway between Corinth and Mem- 
phis. We reached this place last Sunday; Monday evening we 
started on a forced march to Holly Springs, thirty miles distant. 

My men stood the march remarkably well ; better by far than 
any other regiment in the brigade. If you could have seen the 
poor fellows with the blood oozing from every toe, and never 
murmuring, you would have pitied them, I know. Well, the 
Rebels filed out just before we got to Holly Springs, and after 
remaining there about twenty-four hours, we took the back track 
and got back here Thursday about noon. I have my men so 
that they will go till they drop in their tracks before they will 
give up. When other regiments scattered their men all along 
the road, the Fifty-third kept together, not losing a man by 
the way. I am proud of my regiment, for I know they will do 
whatever I want them to do. Yesterday evening for the first 
time for nearly two weeks we got a meal. 

We are now in a magnificent country; fine plantations and 
good water. The health of the regiment is improving amaz- 
ingly. Tell Captain Long his company is getting along finely, 
and it is much larger than when he left. His men are very anxious 
for him to return. I hope he will recover his health, but I want 
him to stay at home until he gets well. Tell him to be patient. 
I will see that he has no trouble about his absence. 

I don't know how you have heard that I have been sick. I 
have not been off duty a day since we left Indianapolis. True, 
at times I have not been awfully well, but I have never been sick, 
and now my health is very good. 

LaGrange, Tenn., 

July 8, 1862 
Well, we have been to Holly Springs again. We got there 
Sunday morning. I was then ordered to Grand Junction, about 



CORINTH AND MEMPHIS 193 

twenty-one miles. We started about daylight and marched the 
whole distance by 2 o'clock. At the Junction I found the Twenty- 
third Indiana, or rather, six companies of it; the Twentieth Ohio, 
the Sixty-eighth Ohio, two batteries and one company of cavalry, 
with no kind of order or discipline — the soldiers every place but 
the right place and the officers at hotels. I at once issued an order 
requiring all officers and soldiers immediately to go to their respec- 
tive camps and remain there except when it became necessary to 
leave on business. I appointed a provost marshal, gave him a 
strong guard, and sent him out in town to arrest the stragglers, 
officers and men. Believe me, I soon cleaned up the place and 
the citizens expressed themselves as highly pleased with my 
action. After that I had no trouble. 

On the morning of the Fourth, a number of citizens, a large 
committee, called on me to know whether we would join them in 
celebrating the national anniversary. I promptly responded in 
the affirmative. In a short time they returned and said : "Possi- 
bly you can appreciate why all our speakers are ;ust now absent." 
And then I saw I was in for it. They selected me to do the speak- 
ing. I could not decline and had no time to prepare, so I went 
at it extemporaneously. I gave them a good sound Union talk, 
and explained to the natives what we were fighting for, which 
seemed to please many of them very much. They have been 
taught to believe that we are all Abolitionists. 

Yesterday General Hurlbut came back to LaGrange, and I 
was ordered to join my old brigade, and accordingly came down 
here yesterday evening. We are likely to remain -here or some- 
where else along the Memphis & Charlestown Railway until fall, 
unless we go to Vicksburg, which is not improbable. 

The weather is very hot here now, but we have a nice breeze 
nearly all the time. The mercury gets up over 100 every day. 
My health is good ; I feel fine now. I was a little unwell for a few 
days last week, but not to amount to anything. 

I forgot to tell you that on the Fourth I dined with a right 
good Union man by the name of Smith. He came in the morn- 
ing and invited me to come out at 3 o'clock and bring four or 
five of my friends with me. I took Lieutenant-Colonel Force, 
of the Twentieth Ohio, Major Davis, and a few others, and be 
assured we did justice to the table. The dinner was siunptuous. 



194 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

I heard with great sorrow of the death of Captain Long, 
another victim of this wicked rebehion. He was patriotic, brave, 
and generous — there was no better man in the army. In him 
I have lost a true and most devoted friend, but my loss is nothing 
compared with that of his poor wife and children. 

I am not mistaken about being able to stand this life. I have 
been at it long enough to know now; so much depends on a man's 
will. I might have been sick several times if I had consented 
to it. Our regiment has seen more hard service than any other 
regiment in this army, for the time we have been out, and while 
we were before Corinth we did more heavy skirmishing than any 
other regiment in our division. 

I must get to work. Do the best you can; be of good cheer, 
for this state of things will not last always. When my time is 
out in the army, I shall consider that I am yours. 

Moscow, Tenn., 

July 12, 1S62 
All well; not a sick man in the regiment. Every man we 
have marched twenty-five miles yesterday, carrying from thirty 
to forty pounds. 

Memphis, Tenn., 
July 22, 1862 
We arrived here yesterday evening, after a terrible march 
of four days. I had four or five cases of .^unstroke in my regi- 
ment, but fortunately they all recovered. We were more fortu- 
nate than many other regiments. The Fifty-third Illinois had 
three men fall dead in their tracks day before yesterday. 

Daily letters came urging me to come to Memphis. In 
response, I started, going by river on a through boat. It 
was early in the morning when we landed at Memphis, and 
my husband was there to meet me. We w^ent to the Gayoso 
House, which w^as then a good hotel. 

It was there that I first met both General Sherman 
and General McPherson. General Sherman's greeting was 
w^armth itself. He told me how^ my husband delighted 
hini w^hen he came to report to him the year before at 



CORINTH AND MEMPHIS 195 

Muldrough Hill, Kentucky.' General Sherman introduced 
me to General McPherson as, "Mrs. Gresham, the wife of 
one of my best Kentucky colonels." Silent and taciturn, 
McPherson was the antithesis of Sherman in temperament. 

The talk was of Grant and Vicksburg. And the man 
next most talked about was Colonel John A. Rawlins, 
General Grant's chief of staff. Almost forgotten by the 
present generation, when the real history of the war is 
written Rawlins will be one of its most prominent char- 
acters. Certainly they were going to clean the country 
to the Gulf of armed resistance. There may have been 
doubt and uncertainty at Washington and in the Army of 
the Potomac, as it is recorded, but the men I met then and 
afterwards believed that as sure as the sun shone they 
would succeed. They all believed in General Grant's ability 
to lead them. I heard then how McPherson was General 
Grant's superior in military learning and engineering, and 
yet depended absolutely on Grant's judgment and executive 
ability. 

It was during this visit that Walter Q. Gresham was 
serving on the general court martial that was then sitting at 
Fort Pickering.- The camp of the Fifty-third was out of Mem- 
phis a short distance. I ate the army meals and made cake 
in the camp, but only enough for a taste, as one officer said. 

The Gayoso House was crowded with men, so we went 
to board with a Mrs. Fackler, who had a fine residence in 
the best part of the city and not far from the camp of the 
Fifty-third. She gave us elegant dinners. Her husband, 
who, it was said, had served on Albert Sidney Johnson's 
staff at Shiloh, was then a colonel in the Confederate army. 
She was an accomplished, refined woman, with several small 
children. She took me to the stores to get some needed 
summer clothing and treated me as a guest. ■' We discussed 
everything that women do, but one subject we avoided, — • 

1 See page 158. 2 See page 184. 

3 In a letter of August 20 from Memphis, Colonel Gresham says: "I have not seen Mrs. 
Fackler since you left, but I will see her soon on your account." 



196 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

that was the War. One object she had in keeping boarders 
was the protection the presence of Federal officers afforded. 
Aside from ourselves there were several officers and their 
wives with her. Many Confederates foolishly abandoned 
Memphis, and their houses were sacked. While we were 
at Mrs. Fackler's, the house next door, whose owner had 
abandoned it, was occupied by a lieutenant and much des- 
truction was done to the contents. I was visiting camps 
and enjoying myself when in ten days my visit was cut 
short by the regiment being ordered to Bolivar. 

No one could hear the officers talk and feel their force 
and powTr without sharing something of their conviction 
and enthusiasm which went down to the men, the "boys" 
in the ranks. I made no mistake in my estimate of the 
men of the Army of the Tennessee that I met on that trip 
to Memphis. When I reached home I told my father what 
I had heard and seen, and that henceforth I would bet on 
the Union. I was always something of a speculator on the 
safe side.^ I astonished him when I said, "My savings, 
which I hope and pray I will never need, will go into gov- 
ernment bonds." And he was still Irish enough to see the 
humor when I asked him if he still thought one Reb was 
equal to five Yanks, and if he thought that Abolitionist 
husband of mine would fight. 

September 15, 1862, my first letter came from Bolivar. 
It told of a march of 90 miles, a roundabout way, averaging 
18 miles a day. "Good marching through the heat and 
dust. ' ' I received many letters from Bolivar. The Twenty- 
third Indiana was there. "I got a paper yesterday, the first 
since I left Memphis," wrote Colonel Gresham. "The Rebels 
are having a good time just now. Pope is a miserable hum- 
bug. I predicted disaster when he was put in command 
in Virginia. Our soldiers are very much chagrined at our 
recent bad luck. They are clamoring to be led against the 
enemy. All they want is to be allowed to fight." 

1 See page 634. 



CORINTH AND MEMPHIS 197 

It was while the Fifty-third Indiana was at BoHvar, 
Tennessee, that the victories in the open in September 
over the commands of Generals Van Dorn and Price, and 
the failure of the attack of Van Dorn, Price, and Villes- 
pique on Corinth, October 4, 1862, left General Grant 
free to open up his Vicksburg campaign down the Missis- 
sippi Central Railroad through the center of the vState. 
But this movement General Grant says was a feint. The 
real movement was led by General Sherman and was by 
steamboats down the river. This joint movement, which 
General Grant inaugurated with half the men General 
Halleck had May 31, 1862, when Corinth fell, began No- 
vember 2, 1862. 

But progress was slow. With General Grant's army 
was the Fifty-third and its Colonel. Under date of No- 
vember 5, letters began to come from the old camp near 
LaGrange, Tennessee. There was criticism of the delay. 

I still believe the Union will be maintained in spite of all the 
blundering of cominanding officers. 

We have an army concentrated at this place large enough to 
whip anything in front of us. Our supplies are brought over the 
Mobile & Ohio Railroad, that being the only road now open to 
us. The road from here to Memphis, 44 miles, is being repaired. 
When it is opened there will be but little trouble experienced in 
feeding the army. It is 160 miles by rail to Columbus, Ken- 
tucky. There is not enough in this county to subsist an anny if 
supplies from home were cut off. You can have no idea of the 
destructive effects of war until you see it with your own eyes. 
There never was a people in the world who rushed so madly 
and blindly upon their own destruction as those of the South 
have done. 

At LaGrange Colonel Gresham made the acquaintance 
of Mrs. Clay and her daughter, cousins of the Rebel sen- 
ator from Alabama. "Mrs. Clay is a widow with three 
sons in the Rebel army. She and her daughter live close 
to our camp. They are strong Secesh." 



iqS life of WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

The following letters from my husband are of interest 

at this point: 

Near LaGrange, Tenn., 

November 26, 1862 

I was attacked last Saturday with what the doctors call 
bilious pneumonia. I was quite sick for a while but am much 
better now, and expect to be out again soon. I remained in camp 
until Monday, when the boys removed me to a private house 
close by — that of the Widow Clay, as she is called here. Since 
yesterday morning I have been able to sit up part of the time, 
and now I am feeling quite well with the exception of soreness in 
my right lung. 

The pain was very severe Saturday night, Sunday, and 
Sunday night. I found great relief this time in severe cupping 
and blistering. I should have stated that I was taken with a 
chill which was followed by fever from which I was not relieved 
until yesterday. Although I am not looking and feeling as well 
as I would like, still I am not looking half so bad as you would be 
apt to imagine. 

I have written you the honest truth about myself for I want 
you to know that you can depend on what I say. Dr. Slaughter 
is a most excellent physician ; he has been very kind to me, and has 
been with me ever since I left camp. Mrs. Clay is very kind to 
me; in fact, I think she is one of the noblest women I ever met. 
She has taken as much interest in nursing me and having it done 
as if I had been her son, notwithstanding, as I have before written 
you, she has three sons in the Rebel army, and she is as strong 
Secesh as Mrs. Slaughter is Union. Her daughter is as channing 
as ever. She is playing the piano now. 

Dr. Slaughter has just come in and informed me that he has 
learned that we will likely be on the move by the last of the week. 
Our destination will probably be Holly Springs, where we will 
remain until General McClernand starts down the Mississippi 
with his expedition. 

Dr. Slaughter has just come in again with word that our 
brigade has orders to march this morning. I can't go as soon 
as that and don't think any such orders have been issued. 
I could not get home should I try; so be contented. I am 
doing well. 



CORINTH AND MEMPHIS 199 

Headquarters, 53D Indiana Volunteers, 
LuMPKiNS Mills, Miss., December 3, 1862 

We are now ten miles south of Holly Springs. The regiment 
started from LaGrange Friday morning about daylight. Not 
being entirely well I remained behind until i o'clock and then 
broke away and caught up. We arrived here Sunday evening, 
and will move on in the morning. A portion of our forces are 
now at Tallahatchie, the Rebels having fallen back after feeble 
resistance. They are now retreating down the Mississippi Central 
Railroad in the direction of Granada. It is supposed they will 
make a stand at Grenada or some other point south of us. I am 
unable to understand why they did not give us battle at Talla- 
hatchie Ri\'er. Thus far there has been nothing serious attending 
our advance — some skinnishing, and we have taken a few hundred 
prisoners. Grant has the flower of the West, a much larger army 
than you imagine. Sherman has joined us from Memphis, and it 
is reported in camp, and I suppose it is true, that Steel has joined 
us from Helena. 

I have entirely recovered from my attack at LaGrange, and 
am feeling fine again. I am always well when on the march. 
An effort was made to get me to remain at LaGrange on account 
of my health, but I could not stand it to stay back when the regi- 
ment was advancing. I have improved every day since I left 
LaGrange. Hope we will see the waters of the Mississippi by 
Christmas. We are all in fine spirits and much elated at the pros- 
pects of getting farther down into the heart of Dixie. 

Headquarters, 53D Indiana Volunteers, 
LuMPKiNS Mills, Miss., December 5, 1S62 

We have been here longer than I supposed we would be. We 
may move any day and we may not move for a week. We are 
ready to pull out any hour. December thus far has been anything 
else than pleasant, although we are in the "Sunny South." I 
don't remember having ever seen worse weather in Indiana than 
we have had here for the last few days. With the exception of 
one day it has been almost constantly raining, blowing, and 
snowing. It has cleared off this evening and I hope we will get 
some sunshine. 



I 

200 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

I have entirely recovered from the attack at LaGrange. I 
beheve I wrote you about the kind treatment I received from 
Mrs. and Miss Clay. I shall never forget them. When I left 
to join the regiment they tried hard to induce me to remain 
longer. I confess there was considerable hesitancy, but my sense 
of duty overcame my love of ease and I left their pleasant and 
hospitable home. Miss Clay gave me a letter to some of their 
friends in Holly Springs but we did not stop there long enough 
for me to deliver it. I would send it to you but I may present 
it yet. 

You speak of having a discussion with Mr. Slatighter about 
abolitionism and about being displeased with Mr. Pike for preach- 
ing an abolition sermon. I fear you are influenced more by your 
prejudice on that subject than you are by your good sense. 

Abolitionism that is now synonymous with everything that is 
not pro-slavery, is the great monster that frightens conservatives 
out of their propert}^ I am fast coming to the conclusion that 
none of us will ever be permitted to enjoy peace as long as slavery 
lasts. As long as slavery lasts the people will disagree and quarrel, 
and that they can't do without fighting. The truth is, slavery 
is wrong, and the moral and Christian sentiment of the civilized 
world condemns it. The Northern people believe it is wrong, 
and so will continue to fight and denounce it. 

We can already clearly see one thing as the result of this war 
and that is the doom of slavery. I advise you to think a little on 
the subject, and the better to enable you to arrive at a correct 
conclusion I recommend you to read Robert Dale Owen's letter 
to Secretary Chase. Ask Mr. Slaughter for a paper containing 
the letter. 

Mr. Slaughter procured me a paper containing Mr. 
Owen's letter, which w^as dated November lo, and published 
in the New York Evening Post, November 22, 1862.1 This 

1 To THE Hon. Salmon P. Ch.\se, New York, November lo, 1862 

Secretary of the Treasury. 

Sir: In briefest terms I state the propositions whicii, as the subject of our recent con- 
versation, I promised to reduce to writing. 

What are the reasonable hopes of peace? 

Not, that within the next fifty days the South, availing herself of the term of grace offered 
in the President's proclamation, may. to save her favorite institution, return to her allegiance. 
Let us not deceive ourselves. There are no conditions, no guarantees — no, not if we proffer 



CORINTH AND MEMPHIS 20T 

letter and two that preceded it — the first addressed to 
Secretary Stanton, July 23, 1862, published first in the New 
York Evening Post, August 8, 1862; the second, addressed 
and handed to Mr. Lincoln September 17, and printed in 
the New York Tribune, October 26 — were printed in pam- 
phlet form and sent broadcast throughout the army. The 



ablanksheet on which to set them down, with unrestricted pen, in her own hand — under which 
she will consent to reunion, except in one contingency — conquest, more or less complete by force 
of arms. 

Are we likely to obtain peace by conquest? 

In search of an answer, let us look closely at a few statistical facts. By the census of 
i860, the number of white males between the ages of eighteen and forty-five, is, in the loyal 
States, about 4,000,000; and in the disloyal States about 1,300,000; a little upwards of three 
to one. The disproportion seems overwhelmingly great. 

But this calculation, as a basis of military strength, is wholly fallacious, for it includes 
persons of one color only. 

Out of the above 4,000,000 the North has to provide soldiers and (with inconsiderable 
exceptions, not usually extending to field labor) laborers also. 

But of the 3,500,000 slaves owned in the Rebel States, about 2,000,000 may be estimated 
as laborers. Allow 300,000 of these as employed in domestic services and other occupations 
followed by women among us, and we have 1,700,000 plantation hands, male and female, 
each one of which counts against a Northern laborer on farm or in workshop. 

Then, of that portion of population whence soldiers and outdoor laborers and mechanics 
must chiefly be taken, the Northern States have 4,000,000 and the Southern States 3,000,000. 

Supposing the negroes all loyal to their masters, it follows that the true proportion of 
strength available in this war — that is, of soldiers to fight and laborers to support the nation 
while fighting — may fairly enough be taken at three in the South to four in the North. 

Under this supposition of a South united, without regard to color, in an effort for recog- 
nition, shall we obtain peace by subduing her? If history teach truth, we shall not. Never, 
since the world began, did 9,000,000 of people band together, resolutely inspired by the one 
idea of achieving their independence, yet fail to obtain it. It is not a century since one-third 
of the number successfully defied Great Britain. 

But let us suppose the negroes of the South loyal to the Union instead of to their masters; 
How stands the matter then? 

In that case, it is not to a united people, but to a confederacy divided against itself, that 
we are opposed; the masters on one side; the laborers, exceeding them in number, on the other. 

Suppose the services of these laborers transferred to us, what will then be the proportion, 
on either side, of forces available, directly or indirectly, for military purposes? 

As about five and three-fourths to one and a third; in other words, nearly as nine to two. 

Such a wholesale transfer is, of course, impossible in practice. But in so far as the trans- 
fer is possible, and shall occur, we approach the above results. 

How much wisdom, under these circumstances, is there in the advice that we should put 
down the rebellion first and settle the negro question afterwards? What shall we say of their 
statesmanship, who, in a war like this, would leave out of view the practical effects of emanci- 
pation? 

On the other hand, however, it is to be admitted that African loyalty in this war will little 
avail us, if we have not good sense and good feeling enough properly to govern the negroes 
who may enter our lines. 

To render their aid available, in the first place, we must treat them humanely, a duty we 
have yet to learn; and secondly, both for their sakes and for our own, we must not support 
them in idleness. Doubtless, they are most efficient as laborers, as domestics in camp, as 
teamsters, or employed on intrenchments and fortifications, or in ambulance corps, or as sappers 
and miners; or, as fast as Southern plantations shall fall into our possession, as field hands. 



202 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

second preceded Mr. Lincoln's preliminary emancipation 
by five days. These three letters, most admirable in style 
and among the most remarkable productions of the war, 
may have been a factor in producing conviction in Mr. 
Lincoln's mind; for it was a long way from declaring before 
the world, as he did in his inaugural address, that he was 

But if all these posts become overfilled, better do away with the necessity for further 
draft in the North by putting muskets in the hands of able-bodied men, colored differently from 
ourselves, than to delude their ignorance into the opinion that among the privileges of freedom 
is food without work. 

Have we philanthropj' and discretion enough wisely to administer such a change of system? 
Possibly not. Administrative capacity in public affairs is not our strong point. We would 
do well to bear in mind, however, that without such capacity not this war only but our entire 
governmental experiment, will prove a failure at last. 

Do other objections hold against the plan? Does humanity forbid us to accept the aid 
of an enslaved race? In so far as humanity can ever enjoin war at all, she enjoins the employ- 
ment, by us, of the African in this struggle; first, because his employment may shorten, by 
years, the fratricidal struggle; and then because, if he is not permitted to assist in civilized 
warfare under us, and if, without his aid, we fail to effect his liberation and thus disappoint 
his hopes, he may be overtaken by the temptation to seek freedom and revenge in his own wild 
way. 

In accepting the liberated slave as a soldier, we may prevent his rising as an assassin. 
By the creation of negro brigades we may avert the indiscriminate massacres of servile insur- 
rection. 

Or is there an insuperable difficulty of caste in the way? In a contest likely to eventuate 
in securing to another race than ours the greatest of temporal blessings, are we determined 
to shut out that race from all share in its own liberation? Arc we so enamored of the Moloch, 
War, that we will suffer none but our sons to pass through the fire? Terrible penalty to pay, 
with life and death at stake, for a national prejudice against the Southern pariah! 

As to the duty of our rulers in the premises. I cannot see according to what principle of 
ethics a government charged with the lives of millions, the putting down of a gigantic rebel- 
lion, and the restoring of tranquillity to the land, has the right, in the hour of its utmost need, 
to scorn a vast element of strength placed within its reach and at its disposal; nor why, if it 
refuses to avail itself of such an element, it should not be held responsible for the lives it sacri- 
fices and the hopes it blights. 

But we need emancipation far less for the material aid it affords — great, even indispens- 
able, though it be — than because of other paramount considerations. 

We have tried the experiment of a Federal Union, with a free-labor system in one portion 
of it and a slave system in another, for eighty years; and no one familiar with our affairs for a 
quarter of a century past is ignorant that the result has been an increase — embittered year 
by year in ever-accelerated ratio — of dissensions, of sectional jealousies, of national heart- 
burnings. When eighteen months since, these culminated in war, it was but the issue which 
our ablest statesmen, looking sorrowfully into the future, had long since foretold. But if while 
yet at peace, and with all the influence of revolutionary reminiscences pleading the cause of 
Union, this diversity of labor systems producing variance of character and alienation of feeling, 
proves stronger to divide than all past memories and present interests to unite, what chance 
is there that its baneful power for evil should cease now, when the thoughts of fancied injuries 
in other years are added to the recollections of the terrible realities enacted on a hundred 
bloody battlefields from which the smoke has scarcely passed away? 

None — the remotest! 

A suspension of hostihties we can purchase; a few years' respite, probably, in which to 
return to our money-getting before the storm bursts forth anew with gathered force; but if 
we look beyond selfishness and the present; if our children are in our thought; if we are suffering 



CORINTH AND MEMPHIS 203 

willing that slavery should be made express and irrevocable 
in the Constitution, to issuing a conditional emancipation 
proclamation. Long before the people and the politicians 
in the rear, the Democrats in the ranks almost without 
exception — my brother, Major Thomas McGrain, was one 
of the exceptions ^ adopted emancipation as a war measure. 



and expending now that they in a land of prosperity may live and die in peace, then must we 
act so that the result shall endure. We must not be content to put off the evil day. The 
root of the evil — the pregnant cause of the war — that must be eradicated. 

Report has it that a western politician recently proposed, as the best solution of our 
difficulties, the recognition of slavery in all the States. Such an idea has a basis of truth; 
namely, that a state of war is among us, the necessary result of conflicting labor systems. 
Such an idea might even be carried out and lead to peace, but for that progressive spirit of 
Christian civilization which we dare not openly outrage, howsoever imperfectly we obey its 
humane behests. 

There are a thousand reasons — geographical, commercial, political, international — why 
we should not consent to a separation into two confederacies; it is a contingency not to be 
thought of or entertained; but if we look merely to the conditions of lasting peace, the chance 
of maintaining it would be far better if the independence of the South were to be recognized 
with her negroes emancipated, than if she were to return to her allegiance retaining her slave 
system. , 

For in the former case, the cause of dissension being uprooted, the tendency would be to 
reunite, and a few years might see us a single nation again; while, in the latter, a constantly 
active source of irritation still e.xisting, three years of breathing time would not elapse without 
bringing endless quarrels and a second rebellion. 

Conceive reunion with slavery still in existence. Imagine Southern sympathizers in power 
among us offering compromises. Suppose the South, exhausted with military reverses and 
desiring a few years' armistice to recruit, decides to accept it under the guise of peace and 
reconstruction? What next? Thousands of slaves, their excited hopes of emancipation 
crushed, fleeing across the border. A fugitive slave law revived by peace, demanding their 
rendition. Pppular opinion in the North opposed to the law, and refusing the demand. Re- 
newed war the certain consequences. 

Or take even the alternative of recognition — recognition of an independent Confederacy, 
still slave-holding. Are we, then, becoming the sole exception among the nations of the earth 
to make ourselves aiders and abetters of the slave system of a foreign nation, by agreeing to 
return to her negro refugees seeking liberty and an asylum among us? National self-respect 
imperatively forbids us. Public sentiment would compel the rejection, as a base humiliation, 
of any proposed treaty stipulation providing for rendition of runaway slaves. Yet the South 
would regard such rejection in no other light than as a standing menace — a threat to deprive 
her of what she regards as her most valuable property. Coterminous as for hundreds — 
possibly thousands — of miles our boundaries would be, must not the South, in common pru- 
dence, maintain all along that endless border line an armed slave police? Are we to consent 
to this? And if we do, shall we escape border raids after fleeing fugitives? No sane man will 
expect it. Are we to suffer these? We are disgraced. Are we to resent them? It is a renewal 
of hostilities. 

State elections may go as they will. Their results can never change the fact that any 
party obtaining the control of the government and adopting the policy that the settlement of 
the emancipation question is to be postponed till the war shall be closed — not even by accepting 
a shameful disruption of our country. 

But if emancipation is to avail us as a peace measure, we must adopt it boldly, resolutely, 
effectually. It must be general, not partial; extending not to the slaves of Rebels only, but to 
every slave on this continent. Even if it were practicable — which it is not, with slavery non- 
existent in the Northern States and abolished in those which persist in rebellion — to maintain 



204 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

Two captains of the Fifty-third Indiana stood out with him. 
It took more courage to do this, encouraged though they 
were from the rear, than to go up against a Rebel battery. 
He argued against it, quoted Mr. Lincoln's inaugural ad- 
dress, the pledges made to the Kentuckians in 1861, that 
it would not be made an Abolition war, and tendered his 



it in the narrow border strip, it is precisely there, where negro fugitives can the most readily 
escape, that its maintenance would the most certainly lead to war. 

Can this great peace measure be constitutionally enacted? 

A proclamation or (the more appropriate form) an act of General Emancipation, should, 
in its preamble, set forth in substance that the claims to service or labor of which it deprives 
certain persons having been proved by recent events to be of a character endangering the 
supremacy of the law, jeopardizing the integrity of- the Union, and incompatible with the 
permanent peace of the country, are taken by the government, with just compensation made, 
under circumstances far less urgent than these, the law or custom of civilized nations, based 
on considerations of public utility, authorizes such taking of private property for public use. 
We ourselves are familiar with its operation. When a conflagration in a city threatens to 
spread far, houses in the line of its progress may legally be seized and destroyed by the author- 
ities in order to arrest it; and the owners are not held to have been wronged if they are paid 
for such losses under an equitable appraisement. But it is not the existence of part of a city 
that is now endangered; it is the integrity of one among the first powers of the world that 
is menaced with destruction. 

The truth of the preamble suggested has become, in my judgment, incontrovertible. It 
will receive the assent of an overwhelming majority of the people, of the loyal States. The 
public sentiment of Europe will admit its truth. 

Let us confess that such preamble, as preface to act or proclamation, could not have com- 
manded the assent of more than a small fraction of our people only two short years ago — 
two years, as we reckon time; a generation, if we calculate by the stirring events and far-reaching 
upheavals that have been crowded into the eventful months. In such days as those abuses 
ripen rapidly, their consequences mature, their ultimate tendencies become apparent; we are 
reminded of their transitory character. We are reminded that although for the time, and 
in a certain stage of human progress, some abuses may have their temporary use, and for this, 
under God's economy, may have been suffered to continue; yet all abuses have but a limited 
life. The right only is eternal. 

The rebellion — teacher and creator as well as scourge and destroyer — by sternly laying 
bare the imminent dangers of slavery, has created the constitutionality of emancipation. It 
has done more. It has made emancipation a bounden political duty as well as a strictly con- 
stitutional right. 

Can we, in declaring emancipation, legally avoid the payment, say of two hundred mil- 
lions, in the shape of compensation to loyal slaveholders? 

Not if a slaveholder's right to service and labor from his slaves, when not forfeited by 
treason, is legal. On humanitarian grounds the legality of that right has been denied. But 
a construction of the Constitution adverse to such denial, and acquiesced in by the nation 
throughout more than two generations, is held by most men to be reason sufficient why the 
right in question should be regarded as private property. If it be private property, then 
except by violating the fifth article of the amendments to the Constitution, it cannot be taken 
for public use without just compensation. To violate any article of the Constitution is a revolu- 
tionary act; but such acts cost a nation more than a few hundred million dollars. 

The risk that a future decision of the Supreme Court might declare emancipation without 
compensation to be unconstitutional, is of itself sufficient justification of the President's 
policy, corresponding to the above suggestions in this matter. 

Such compensation will be unpopular with many. Wise and just acts, when they involve 
sacrifices, frequently are. A wrong, long tolerated, commonly entails a penalty, which is 



CORINTH AND MEMPHIS 205 

resignation because he had enHsted to save the Union, not 
to free the negroes. But the logic of events was more 
potent than any former utterances of the President. The 
war, as my husband afterwards said, was legislating.' Pos- 
sessing moral courage of the highest type General Grant was 



seldom cheerfully paid. Yet, even on other grounds, we ought not in this case to begrudge the 
money. Who deserve better of their country than those brave men who, in the border and 
other slave States, have clung to their loyalty through all the dark hours of peril even to life? 
Precautions naturally suggest themselves against false pretenses of loyalty. It seems 
expedient that he who shall have proved that he is the legal owner of certain slaves, and also 
that he has ever been loyal to the Union, should receive a certificate of indebtedness by the 
government, not transferable, to be paid at some fixed time subsequent to the termination of 
the war; payment being made contingent on the fact that the claimant shall not, meanwhile, 
ha'-e lapsed from his loyalty. 

Every such claimant, once recognized, would feel himself to be, by his own act, the citizen 
of a Free State — one of us, detached forever from the Southern league. A government stock- 
holder, he would become pecuniarily interested in the support of the government and the 
restoration of peace. 

The legislatures of the border States may not initiate such a policy, but the loyal men 
of these States will accept it. Such a measure does not involve expense in conveying the 
liberated negro to other countries. It has hitherto, indeed, been the usual policy in Slave 
States to discourage as dangerous the residence there of free blacks; and hence an idea that 
colonization should be the concomitant of emancipation. Of general emancipation there is 
no need whatever that it should be. Those who take up such an idea forget that the jealousy 
with which slaveholders regard the presence of free negroes spring out of the dread that these 
may infect with a desire for freedom the slaves around them, thus rendering them insubordinate. 
But when all are free there will be no slaves to incite, not any chains to be broken by resort 
to insurrection. 

It is no business of ours either to decide for the liberated negro where he shall dwell, nor 
to furnish his traveling expenses. Freemen, black or white, should select their own dwelling 
place and pay their own way. 

As to the fears of competition in labor sought to be excited in the minds of the northern 
workingman, they have foundation only in case emancipation be refused; for such refusal 
would flood the North with fugitives. If, on the contrary, emancipation be carried out, the 
strong local attachments of the negro will induce him, with rarest exceptions, to remain as a 
hired laborer where he worked as a slave. Thus humane masters will not lack sufficient work- 
ing hands, of which colonization would deprive them. And if. notwithstanding the probable 
rise of Southern staples, profits, at first, should be less, the security of the planter will be 
greater. He will no longer lie down at night uncertain whether the morning's news may not 
be that his slaves have risen against him. 

This is the paper view of the question. But all edicts, all proclamations, how wise and 
righteous soever, are but idle announcements now, if we lack courage and conduct to enforce 
them. 

Courage we have. Raw levies have behaved like veterans. The skeletons of regiments, 
reduced to one-tenth their original number, attest the desperate valor with which they con- 
fronted death. Not with the rank and file is the blame! The leading! There has been the 
secret of failure. 

With all the advantages of a just cause over our enemies, we have suffered them to outdo 
us in earnestness. We lack the enthusiasm which made irresistible the charge of Cromwell's 
Ironsides. We need the invincible impulse of a sentiment. We want, above all, leaders who 
know and feel what they are fighting for. This is a war in which mercenaries avail not. There 
must be a higher motive than the pay of a Swiss — a holier duty urging on than the professional 

1 See page 471. 

14 



2o6 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

rated a fatalist. "Unconditional and immediate surrender^ 
anticipated the men in the cloister and was abolitionism- 
pure and simple. General Grant says he was pledged to 
vote for Stephen A. Douglas in 1860.^ I read Mr. Owen's 
letter with great interest. Still it did not entirely remove 



pride or the blind obedience of a soldier. By parliamentary usage a proposed measure is 
intrusted, for fostering care to its friends. So should this war be. Its conduct should be 
confined to men whose hearts and souls are in it. 

Again. It has long been one of our national sins that we pass by, with scarcely a rebuke, 
the gravest public offenses. We utterly fail in holding to a strict accountability our public 
men. The result of such failure, in peace had almost escaped our notice. In war we have 
now beheld its effects, flagrant and terrible. It was not to be expected that among so many 
thousands of officers suddenly appointed there should not be some hundreds of incompetents. 
Such things must be. No one is to blame, if, in field and garden, weeds spring up. The blame 
rests with him who leaves them there to choke the crop and cumber the ground. 

Accountability — that should be the watchword — accountability, stern, unrelenting! 
Office has its emoluments; let it have its responsibilities also. Let us demand, as Napoleon 
demanded, success from our leaders. The rule may work harshly. War needs harsh rules. 
Actions are not to be measured in war by the standard of peace. The sentinel, worn by 
e.xtreme fatigue, who sleeps at his post, incurs the penalty of death. There is mercy in courts 
martial — drum-head courts martial. A dozen officers shot, whenever the gravity of the 
offense demands it, may be the saving of life to tens of thousands of brave men. 

Eighteen months have passed. Eight hundred millions have been spent. We have a 
million of armed men in the field. More than a hundred thousand rest in soldiers' graves. 
And for all this, what result? Is it strange if sometimes the heart sinks and resolution fails 
at the thought that, from sheer administrative infirmity, the vast sacrifice may have been all 
in vain? 

But let the past go. Its fatal faults (difficult perhaps to avoid, under an effort so sudden 
and so vast) can never be recalled. Doubtless they had their use. It needed the grievous 
incapacity we have witnessed, the stinging reverses we have suffered, the invasion even of 
Free States we have lived to see commenced. 

It needed the hecatombs of dead piled up unavailingly on battlefield after battlefield; 
the desolate hearth, the broken-hearted survivors; it needed all this to pave the way for that 
emancipation which is the only harbinger of peace. 

The future! That is still ours to improve. Nor, if some clouds yet rest upon it, is it 
without bright promise, signs of recent activity, energy, and a resolution to hold accountable 
for the issues the leaders of .our armies, are daily apparent. Better than all, the initiative of 
a true line of policy has been taken. The 23d of September has had its effect. The path of 
safety is before us; steep and rugged, indeed, but no longer doubtful nor obscure. A lamp 
has been lit to guide our steps — a lamp that may burn more brightly before a new year dawns 
upon us. The noble prayer of Ajax has been vouchsafed in our case. At last we have light 
to fight by. 

We shall reach a quiet haven if we but follow faithfully and perseveringly that light. 

There is, at this moment, in the hearts of all good men throughout the length and breadth 
of the land, no deeper feeling, no more earnest longing, than for peace; peace, not for the day, 
not to last a few years, but peace as a foundation of rock, for ourselves and for our children 
after us. May the hearts of our rulers be open to the conviction that they can purchase only a 
shambling counterfeit except at one cost. God give them to see, ere it be too late, that 
The Price of Enduring Peace is General Emancipation. 

I am, Sir, Your obedient servant, 

Robert Dale Owen. 

1 General Grant to General Buckner, Feb. 16, 1862; see pages 463-64. 

2 See pages 69, 92, 94 and 142. 3 Grant's "Memoirs," page 172. See pages 1 17-18. 



CORINTH AND MEMPHIS 207 

my prejudice. I went back at my husband about that Fourth 
of July meeting at LaGrange, Tennessee, in which he said 
he was not an AboHtionist, and about Mr. Lincoln's first 
inaugural address, but in the end I came to it. No less 
remarkable than the letters was their author, Robert Dale 
Owen, and if Mr. Lincoln selected him as the means of 
first putting his war views before the public, he could not 
have planned better. Meantime, the bombardment Wen- 
dell Phillips and the Abolitionists renewed, produced con- 
viction in the executive mind that was working that way. 
I have made mention of Robert Dale Owen as a Dem- 
ocratic member of Congress. He had represented our 
government at the Neapolitan court up to the breaking 
out of the war. As a member of the Indiana Constitu- 
tional Convention in 1850, he had fought for the enfran- 
chisement of woman from the barbarism of the English 
common law which had been previously adopted as part 
of the organic law of Indiana. Gifted as he was and 
varied in experience, his words commanded attention from 
the time they were uttered. 

General Grant says in his "Memoirs" (page 428), that 
the main body of his troops reached Oxford, and that 17 
miles south of Oxford was as far as any of the troops under 
the command of General McPherson, advanced. Doubtless 
General Grant knew what he was doing, although, as 
appears from the letters. Colonel Gresham at times was 
under a different impression. These letters show, what- 
ever may have been his purpose, why General Grant took 
the "back track." Meanwhile General Sherman failed to 
take Vicksburg. A Confederate Captain Bowie, whom I 
afterwards met and who was in Pemberton's army which 
retreated before Grant's advance, says Grant should have 
done as he did later — cut loose from his supplies, live off 
the country, and besiege Vicksburg from the rear, with Sher- 
man in the front. The Fifty-third Indiana reached almost 
the farthest point south that any of Grant's troops went. 

Colonel Gresham wrote me from the field as follows: 



2o8 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

Camp in Field, South of Oxford, Miss., 

December 14, 1862 

We arrived here last night after a hard day's march. The 
men fell out and straggled along the road by hundreds, but not 
so with the Fifty-third. Our men carried knapsacks, guns, cart- 
ridges, haversacks, one day's rations, and a canteen of water, 
and marched twenty miles. We are 546 strong and only three 
men taking medicine, and they are not so sick but that they could 
march. We still have some men back at LaGrange. When we 
went into camp our men were all up but three. I wrote from 
Waterford Thursday morning just as we were starting on the 
march. We are now thirty-five miles south of Waterford. Ox- 
ford is a beautiful country town, a little larger than Corydon. 
We will likely be here two or three days as we draw our supplies 
thirty miles from the railroad. The cars will run up to Oxford 
in a few days and then we will move on. The weather is warm 
and pleasant. Our men are all well. My health is good. 

I am going to ride over to our right to see some Hoosier regi- 
ments that came across the country from Memphis with General 
Sherman. The Hoosiers are great friends down in Dixie. They 
will divide an>'thing in the world with each other, even to their 
clothes. 

I am not able to say when the Rebels will make a stand in 
Mississippi, if indeed they do at all. Some think they will fight 
at Grenada, others think they will make no stand short of Jackson, 
and still others think they will not make a stand anywhere in the 
State. You will know in twenty or thirt\' days. 

In Camp, Six Miles from Oxford, Miss., 

December 23, 1862 

You have doubtless heard ere this of the Rebels getting in 
our rear, capturing small detachments,— some of them not so 
very small — tearing up the railroad, and destroying bridges. 
That is all we know, and that is enough, but we would like to know 
something more of the particulars. I don't know whether our 
movement down here was a ruse or whether General Grant has 
been outwitted, but I am inclined to believe the latter. 

It is understood here that Bragg has succeeded in eluding 
the vigilance of Rosecrans and that a large portion of his force 



CORINTH AND MEMPHIS 209 

are now north of us; that a portion of Bragg's force took Holly 
Springs and other places along the railroad. I don't know whether 
Rosecrans is moving down after Bragg or not, but I suppose he is 
by this time. It looks to me now as though the Rebels made a 
feint on Jackson, Tennessee, and induced General Grant to divide 
his army down here, sending a portion of it to reinforce Jackson, 
and when they had succeeded in that they came in on Holly 
Springs and destroyed the road, thereby dividing our army, and 
cutting off from our supplies those of us who are left down here. 
We have rations with us to do ten days, and there is subsistence 
in the country, so we are in no danger of starving. What we will 
do now I can't say. I don't even know where we are going. 

Yesterday morning the whole anny marched from our camp 
ten miles south of Oxford. We had orders last night to move 
on this morning at 6 o'clock, but before we got on the march, 
the orders were countermanded. 

If Rosecrans is not following Bragg, we will have some hot 
work, for the army that we drove before us as we advanced south 
joined to Bragg's, or rather attacking us simultaneoiisly with 
Bragg, will be able to amuse us, I fear, to our satisfaction. But 
we have a good body of men and they will not be whipped easily. 

You will be apt to know the result of this sudden change of 
affairs before you receive this letter. 

Don't be uneasy about me, for I am in fine health and spirits, 
not the least depressed. I shall await future developments with 
patience. Would not be surprised if we turn up at Corinth in 
six or seven days. 

We only know that Burnside is engaged with the Rebels. 
Suppose you have known the fate of the Army of the Potomac 
for several days. I have more anxiety about matters in Vir- 
ginia than I have about our own position. 

I give here an interesting letter from my husband, 
written at the beginning of 1863 : 

Camp at Lumpkins Mills, Miss., 

January 3, 1863 
The blockade i.s at last raised. Since the Rebels destroyed 
our communications to the north I have been ignorant of what 



2IO LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

transpired outside of our lines. I was at Holly Springs yesterday 
and learned that General Burnside had fallen back and taken a 
position on the north side of the Rappahannock again, which I 
interpret thus: that he attacked Lee near Fredericksburg and got 
decidedly whipped. I have not seen a paper later than the 15th 
of December, but our communication (by rail) with Memphis is 
now open and I suppose we will soon know something of what 
has been transpiring during the time we have had no communica- 
tion with the North. For a while we expected to be attacked 
every hour, and to tell the truth we did not care much whether 
the Rebels attacked us or not. We have passed the time much 
better than you would suppose. For my own part, aside from 
my anxiety about you and the children, I have put in the 
time very well. The weather has been fine, such as we have in 
Indiana in October. We have been on half rations for ten 
days; that is, we have half rations of meat and hard bread. 
No coffee, sugar, salt, or anything else. We (ourselves) have 
had flour all the time, I having had the precaution to lay in 
a supply in time. 

When I next visited my husband he was stationed at 
Collierville, about thirty-five miles east of Memphis. As 
before, I went down the river by boat. My sister-in-law, 
the wife of my brother Tom, then major of the Fifty-third, 
accompanied me. It was January, 1863. My husband 
met me at Memphis and took me by rail to Collierville, 
which was a small hamlet with camps all around it. It 
was the brigade headquarters. There were not many 
generals in that army, certainly no political generals. In 
almost all instances brigades were under the command of 
colonels. Lieutenant-Colonel Jones was then in command 
of the Fifty-third. 

My husband had been ordered to this point to relieve 
Colonel John M. Loomis of Chicago, in command of the 
brigade. The headquarters were in one of the residences 
of the towm. 

I had been there but ten days when my husband was 
taken sick. There was much sickness among the soldiers — 



CORINTH AND MEMPHIS 211 

smallpox and typhoid fever. There was a pesthouse in 
the town for those afflicted with smallpox. At first the 
doctors could not tell what disease my husband would 
develop. It proved to be typhoid, and for the next five 
weeks I was nurse. We had nothing but army rations, 
no fresh meat and no milk or cream. 

Dr. Slaughter was the surgeon of the Fifty-third. He 
was from Evansville, Indiana, and was a most competent 
man, but after a time my husband grew impatient at his 
lack of progress toward recovery and insisted on a con- 
sultation. At Dr. Slaughter's request, a dozen army sur- 
geons attended. I remember one old doctor telHng how 
much greater the mortality was in cases of typhoid in some 
seasons than others. The summer before, he said, "we 
gave them calomel and jalap until we jalaped them to 
death." 

After many jokes and hearty laughs, each doctor in 
turn told my husband that the treatment prescribed by 
Dr. Slaughter should not be changed, and departed. Dr. 
Slaughter's medicine was fifteen drops of turpentine on 
loaf sugar, given every three hours throughout the fever 
and convalescence. 

The army rations would not do for a speedy convales- 
cence. We must have chickens for broth. The soldiers 
told me they could get them by foraging. I did not know 
what foraging was. One day a bright drummer boy, only 
fifteen years old, came to me with a fat chicken under each 
arm. I asked him where he got them, and he answered, 
"For'gin'." I said, "What do you mean by foraging?" He 
said parties of soldiers went out and scoured the country 
for something to eat. "I went along and jest grabbed 'em 
off the roost." Thus he defined foraging. These chickens 
made fine broth, and more like them brought about a turn 
in the invalid's condition. As soon as he was able to walk, 
he was out of the house into the camps. 

Then came talk that Grant would go down the river 



212 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

to take Vicksburg. Coincident with this, troops were 
moving by train and marching through Colherville for 
Memphis. 

One cold afternoon, with the rain falHng hard and stead- 
ily, a regiment bound for Memphis camped right around 
our house. All the outbuildings were occupied except one 
that was locked. I saw a party of soldiers try the door, 
but they could not get in. Then they improvised a bat- 
tering ram of what looked like a fence rail, and at the 
first blow the door was broken in and they entered. The 
palings from the fences were jerked off, and sooner almost 
than I can tell it, right in the rain, the campfires were 
burning and the kettles and coffee pots boiling. I saw the 
ingenuity of the soldiers exercised many times later, but 
I could not understand then, and never have since, how 
they could make so many fires in so short a time in such 
a soaking rain. The next morning the soldiers, as well 
as all the fences, had disappeared. 

While at Colherville I learned of the renewal of the 
quarrel between my husband and Governor Morton. It 
began in this way. Samuel J. Wright was still one of the 
enlisting officers in Southern Indiana. He wrote a letter 
to my husband stating that certain young men of Harrison 
and adjoining counties had enlisted under an agreement 
that when mustered into service they would be assigned 
to the Fifty-third, but instead they had been assigned and 
were then serving in other regiments, and that such decep- 
tion, as he termed it, "would raise h ." "Little Sam- 
my" never hesitated for a phrase. He admired Thaddeus 
Stevens and Stevens' style of expression. My husband 
wrote Governor Morton, asking him why his regiment was 
not getting any of the recruits. The Governor answered 
that none had enhsted who desired to be sent to the Fifty- 
third. A copy of the letter of Mr. Wright to my husband 
was sent to the Governor. Thereupon the Governor wrote 
the following letter; 



CORINTH AND MEMPHIS 2i,s 

Executive Department, Indianapolis, 

February 4, 1863 
Colonel W. Q. Gresham: 

Sir: — Your letter is at hand and confirms the impression 
before entertained of your purpose and character. If, as you 
say in your letter, you are desirous of serving your country, 
you can best do so by resigning the office you hold. 
A reasonable time will be given you to do so. 

Respectfully, 

O. P. Morton. 

This letter of Governor Morton's was received while 
I was at Collierville. I preserved it. A copy was sent to 
General Hurlbut. His disposition of it follows: 

Headquarters, Sixteenth Army Corps, 

Memphis, February 14, 1863 
Brig. Genl. L. Thomas, 

Adj. Genl. U. S. A. 
General: — 

I have the honor to enclose you a copy of a letter from His 
Excellency Governor Morton of Indiana to Colonel W. Q. Gres- 
ham, Fifty-third Indiana Infantry, a part of my command, and to 
request that the attention of the Secretary of War may be called 
to it. 

Without any reference to the mismiderstanding between the 
Governor and Colonel Gresham I desire simph' to say that 
there appears too much of a disposition on the part of His Excel- 
lency to consider the officers and soldiers furnished by the State 
for the service of the United States as within control of the State 
executive as to military rewards and punishments, and that this 
is a growing evil tending to break up proper subordination and 
respect to their military superiors. The threat inchided in the 
last paragraph is an assumption of power. 

Colonel Gresham has served under me for a \-ear past and I 
have always found him a capable, brave, and energetic officer in 
no wise deserving the language contained in this letter. 
Very Respectfully, Your Obdt. Servt., 

S. A. Hurlbut, 
Commg. 16th Army Corps. , Maj. Genl., U. S. A. 



214 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

War Department 
A. G. O. February 5, 1863 
Respectfully submitted to thjd General-in-Chief. 

Thomas M. Vincent, 
Asst. Adjt. General 

No action seems to be required in this case. The evil referred 
to by General Hurlbut tends to destroy all efficiency and disci- 
pline of the army. 

H. W. Halleck, 

February 26, 1863. General-in-Chief 

Meanwhile, not knowing what action the War Depart- 
ment had taken, when the word came that Governor Mor- 
ton had gone to Washington to see Mr. Lincoln and have 
Gresham dismissed on the ground that he was disloyal, 
Colonel Dornblaser, of the Forty-sixth Illinois; Lieutenant- 
Colonel William Cam, commanding the Fourteenth Illi- 
nois; Colonel George C. Rogers, of the Fifteenth Illinois; 
Colonel George E. Bryant, of the Twelfth Wisconsin; Lieu- 
tenant-Colonel Richard Ritter, commanding the Twenty- 
eighth Illinois; Colonel Cyrus Hall, commanding the 
Second Brigade, Fourth Division, Sixteenth Army Corps; 
Colonel WilHam H. Morgan, of the Twenty-fifth Indiana; 
and every field officer present of the Fifty-third Indiana, 
wrote to Mr. Lincoln protesting against the threat of 
Governor Morton, who in order to gratify a personal 
animosity would have a brave and efficient officer dismissed 
and disgraced on the pretext that that officer was disloyal. 
Instead, many said he should be promoted. 

Mr. Slaughter, my husband's old partner, who was a 
great admirer and friend of Governor Morton and always 
apprehensive that his impetuous young friend would get 
into trouble, heard of the quarrel before the War Depart- 
ment acted. After securing copies of the correspondence, 
Mr. Slaughter took Samuel J. Wright to the Governor 
and secured an understanding that if the Colonel would 



CORINTH AND MEMPHIS 215 

withdraw the imputation in his letter to the Governor, 
the Governor would be satisfied. ^ The Colonel declined, 
and there never was a reconciliation. 

The original letter of Governor Morton, the copy of 
the letter my husband wrote him, the original letter of 
Samuel J. Wright, and the letters of Mr. Slaughter are the 
only papers I ever lost. But I did not really loose them. 
I loaned them to an ex-Union officer who thought many of 
the incidents of the war had best be left untold. What I 
have set forth, including the protests of the brother officers, 
were furnished me from the files of the War Department. 

The talk of "On to Vicksburg," and the movement of 
the troops, made my husband terribly anxious and nervous 
in his convalescence, fearing that he would be left behind. 
Still, I was not prepared for his action. When the orders 
came for his regiment to join the movement, he was still 
so weak he staggered when he walked. The influence of 
will power over the body was never more strikingly illus- 
trated. Entreaties were vain. I went to Memphis with 
him and the troops. At the station at Collierville sick 
soldiers who were being taken to Memphis hospitals were 
lying on the platforms and the floors of the station. They 
were too weak to walk. I said it was a shame to treat 
soldiers in this -way, and in turn was told this was war, 
that they were fortunate in being taken to the hospitals. 
On our arrival at Memphis the troops were marched straight 
to the levee, preparatory to embarking on a steamboat. 
While waiting for a boat to take the troops south, my hus- 
band took me on board a steamboat bound for the North. 
From the rear cabin of my boat, which soon swung out 
into the stream, I watched him until out of sight, but it 
was a long time before I went to sleep that night. 

Instead of going on to Vicksburg the Fifty-third was 
ordered back into camp east of Memphis. Soon letters 
began coming to me. They were largely personal — about 

I See pag^s 227-S. 



2i6 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

my brother's resigning. One said : "Dr. Slaughter's resigna- 
tion has been accepted and he has gone home; he ought 
to go to Dixie." 

Again Mr. Gresham was on the court martial, as the 

following letter states: 

Memphis. Tenn., 

April 1, 1863 
I am still on the court martial — no prospect of getting off 
soon, especially if we remain at Memphis. Cases come in on us 
faster than we can dispose of them. 

I have not yet received the letter that you said Mr. Slaughter 
was going to write. It is but seldom that it is the good fortune 
for any man to have as good a friend as I have in Mr. Slaughter. 
He is one of the men who will never under any circumstances 
prove Untrue to a friend. I guess he takes more interest in my 
affair with Governor Morton than I do myself. So far as Gov- 
ernor Morton is concerned, I neither love nor fear him. 

I hope you are not alarmed about the Rebel invasion of 
Kentucky. I think Burnside will miss the thing in the end. I 
think our prospects for l)ringing down the rebellion are now 
brighter than they have ever been. If we only hold them where 
we have them for a year, mere hunger will conquer them without 
another battle. Just think of a government being reduced to 
such straitened circumstances that it has to go into every little 
grocery store and impress every pound of flour. That of itself 
shows that Dixie is hard up for bread. 

Soon after I reached my home in Corydon I was taken 
sick with typhoid fever. As the Fifty-third Indiana Volun- 
teers was one of the many regiments that still was held at 
or near Memphis, my husband got leave to come home and 
see me. On his return to Memphis, cheerful and interest- 
ing letters soon began coming about the expected campaign 

against Vicksburg. 

Memphis, Tenn., 

May I, 1863 
I arrived here yesterday evening, finding all quiet and the boys 
in good health. The health of the regiment is much better than 



CORINTH AND MEMPHIS 217 

it has ever been since we left Indiana. My health is good; I feel 
stronger than I did before I left you Monday. I boarded the 
Liberty at New Albany Monday evening, preferring the river to 
the railroad. I had a very pleasant trip. Dr. William Slaughter 
got on the boat at Newburg — he has been at home fifty days on 
sick leave and is now on his way to his regiment, the 68th, at 
Vicksburg. At Evansville Mr. Dunn, Mr. Wright's brother-in- 
law, came aboard, so you see I had company. 

The weather is very much as it is in Indiana, but the trees are 
much heavier leaved than they are there. 

Had I known before leaving home what I do now, I should 
have remained a while longer. There is no prospect of a move 
that I can see. I wish you were well enough to come down and 
stay a while with me. There is such a nice place, which is close 
to our camp, where we could lodge and board in camp. Quarter- 
master Thomas has his wife with him; she is boarding with us in 
camp. 

Memphis, Tenn., 

May 7, 1863 

This will make the fourth letter I have written you since I 
arrived here last Friday, still I have not heard a word from you 
since I left home. 

We are just getting news from Hooker. . As far as we ha\^e 
heard, he has done well. I ho])e that the tide will not turn against 
him. I feel very much encouraged at the state of things now; 
everything looks auspicious. I have no doubt about our ability 
to put down the rebellion in a short time. As I have frequently 
said, when the rebellion is put down and the government of our 
fathers is once more secure, I will belong to you. 

I don't see how any man who loves his country and who has 
any spirit, can be content at home now. . . . 

When I returned, I was put on another court martial, so I 
infer that I have given general satisfaction in that way. I come 
into the city from camp at 8 a.m. and return at 4 p.m. I hope 
you will be able to come down and stay a while with me, if we 
remain here this summer. . . . What say you? There is a 
most charming place close to camp, where you can stay. 



CHAPTER XIV 
BEFORE VICKSBURG 



THE TAKING OF VICKSBURG — COLONEL GRESHAM S 
LETTERS FROM THE FRONT, WRITTEN FROM MAY 1 5, 1 863, 
TO CLOSE OF THE SIEGE. 

"'T^HE campaign against Vicksburg," says General 
-■- Grant in his "Memoirs," "was suggested and de- 
veloped by circumstances." With some of the personal- 
ities eliminated, I present several letters of one of Gen- 
eral Grant's colonels (my husband) descriptive of actions 
from Memphis to the fall of Vicksburg. 

Ten Miles below Vicksburg, 

May 15, 1863 

We left Memphis on the old "Fnnnie Bullet" Monday evening, 
and arrived at Young's Point, four miles above Vicksburg, Tuesday 
morning, where we disembarked and marched across the country 
to our present position, arriving here yesterday, Thursday, after 
a very exhausting march through swamps. It commenced raining 
about the time we left Young's Point, and continued with slight 
intermissions until yesterday evening. Had it not been for the 
rain, we would have got over without any trouble. Wednesday 
we marched about five miles, and yesterday we marched about six 
miles. We are now at the point where the troops reembark below 
Vicksburg to go to tlie mouth of Big Black River. At that place 
we will disembark again and march up Big Black about twenty- 
five miles to join General Grant's army. We will be delayed here 
until to-morrow for want of transportation. The first and second 
brigades of our division are not up yet. We left them at Mem- 
phis; they will join us in a few days. I am not able to discover 
anything different between the weather here and at Memphis. 

Some of the boys think it is hotter here than at Memphis, but 

218 



BEFORE VICKSBURG 219 

I don't notice the change. Everything is more forward than at 
Memphis. The boys are out gathering blackberries. 

Hains Bluff, Miss., 

May 23, 1863 

I left Grand Gulf Monday night and joined the army at 
Vicksburg Wednesday morning. Our division was immediately 
ordered to Hains Bluff to prevent the Rebels from coming in 
our rear. We were on the battlefield nearly all day Wednesday. 
Cannonading was frightful. The division is now under march- 
ing orders; to what point I can't say. Everything looks like a 
fight. I am ready and I assure you I feel well — never felt 
better. 

Judge Otto informed me that Ben was dangerously wounded; 
I trust not mortally. Keep me advised of the progress of the 
events at home. As soon as I have time I will write you particu- 
lars. Write and direct your letters to Cairo, to be forwarded. 

Not a sick man in the regiment; all in fine health. 

Near Vicksburg, Miss., 

June I, 1863 

Things stand very much as they did when I wrote you two or 
three days ago. There has been less firing to-day than usual, 
and with the exception of an occasional shell from our artillery, 
all is quiet. It is a most glorious night; the moon rose clear and 
full about dark, shedding a mellow light over the hills and valleys, 
reminding me of home. In fancy I can see you at the front door 
to-night, as I tised to, enjoying the moonlight scenes. 

We are on the extreme left of Grant's anny, which throws us 
on the river below the city. Our camp is not on the river, but 
our line extends that far. Yesterday we had a sharp skirmish. 
To-day we had o ic man wounded in the arm. You doubtless 
think we are living in the swamps on scant rations, but you are 
mistaken. We are on high ground. We have a pleasant breeze 
during the day, and the nights are delightful. So far as eating is 
concerned we are well off. No doubt our fare is better than you 
have at home. We have as much good fresh beef as we want. 
I send the boys out every day and they drive in a good beef. The 
Rebels were driven inside their works so suddenly that they left 



220 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

the greater portion of their beef cattle behind them, and the graz- 
ing is so good til at they are all fat. We have tea and coffee. We 
have two good milk cows and plenty of milk. Then we have 
vegetables, honey, and wheat and corn bread. Of course, we do 
not suffer for want of chickens. How do you like that for a bill 
of fare? You see there is no occasion for our friends at home to 
be uneasy about us on account of short rations. 

There is very little sickness in the regiment. No one is seri- 
ously ill. 

I cannot say when we will have possession of Vicksburg; may- 
be before you receive this letter, and the siege may continue for 
a month or more yet. General Grant thinks he can starve the 
enemy out without sacrificing his men in an assault. 

The Rebels' hope is in Johnston now. They profess to believe, 
that is, some of them do, that Johnston will come up in our 
rear, attack us, and raise the siege. Deserters come over to us 
every day. I saw two yesterday who had just surrendered them- 
selves. They belong to the Fifty-second Georgia. They say that 
the men are limited to half a pound of beef and three-quarters 
of a pound of meal a day. They tell the same tale as all the 
deserters, that the Rebel soldiers are out of heart ; that they have 
no confidence in their ability to hold Vicksburg; and that all, or 
nearly all, want to surrender. This may not all be true, but a 
great deal of it is. . . . 

Camp np:ar Vicksburg, Miss., 

June 6, 1863 
Yesterday evening we advanced our camp three-quarters 
of a mile. We are now in a big hollow with our pickets and 
sharpshooters about one hundred and fifty yards in advance of 
us and on top of the hill. Our camp is not more than four hun- 
dred yards from the enemy's works. Grant's army is patient and 
confident. The boys have never been whipped and they do not 
believe they ever can be. On the contrary, the Rebels here have 
always been whipped. A great portion of the Rebel army in 
Vicksburg was whipped at Donelson, Shiloh, Corinth, and other 
places of less note, and their spirit is to a considerable extent 
broken. All the deserters that come over, and they come over 
every day, concur in stating that the Rebel soldiers in Vicksburg 



BEFORE VICKSBURG 221 

are out of heart, that they do not beheve they can hold the 
place and that they want it surrendered. I suppose Pemberton 
holds out hoping Johnston may be able to collect an army large 
enough to come in on our rear and raise the siege. I can't say 
when Vicksburg will fall, for I do not know how well the place 
is supplied with provisions. I can't think, though, they can hold 
out long, nor can I think Johnston can get here soon with an army 
large enough to endanger our safety. Last night our boys were 
engaged digging rifle pits. We were in easy range of the enemy, 
but not a gun was fired during the night. To-night we work 
again. Soldiering here is not a frolic, but the boys are all satis- 
fied. The health of the regiment continues to be good. Captain 
Dunn of the "Victor" is good enough to be the bearer of this 
letter. He will bring you two fine young mocking birds. Cap- 
tain Burnap of the Seventh Ohio Battery gave me four and 
Captain Dunn agreed to take them up for half. Take good care 
of them, for they will make nice pets. Don't feed them too much 
while they are young. 

Near Vicksburg, 

June 18, 1863 
Firing along the line is incessant. We are now used to it 
and it amounts to nothing. Our regiment has been remarkably 
fortunate thus far. I have had but two men slightly injured. 
Every other regiment in the division has lost more or less in the 
killed and wounded. We have been exposed more than any other 
regiment, for we have advanced the line three times. I watch 
my men closely when they are skirmishing and keep them covered 
as well as I can. Those that have been killed or wounded in the 
division have generally been careless. 

Headquarters, 53D Indiana Volunteers, 

Near Vicksburg, June 19, 1863 
We are just going]on duty ; will remain in the rifle pits twenty- 
four hours. The rest of our regiment will throw up some new 
earthworks to-night. We will finish, or try to finish, a work that 
some of our men were driven from last night. About 9 o'clock 
last night we had quite a scare. The Rebels sallied forth to 
drive our working party back. They opened a furious cannonade 
15 



222 LIFE OfI[w ALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

at the same time that the infantry advanced on our line, or rather, 
on our working party. A Heutenant of the Twelfth Wisconsin 
was wounded in the leg, and four or five men were more or less 
injured. The Rebels were finally driven back. It was quiet 
during the rest of the night. We may have a muss with them 
again to-night, for they understand the importance of preventing 
us from taking the position that we are working for. We are 
trying to throw up works for a battery. 

In Camp near Vicksburg, Miss., 

June 24, 1863 

Major Vestal is now on duty with three companies, and they 
had a sharp little fight this morning, but I have not heard the 
result. The Rebels made a sally on our boys and tried to drive 
them from the rifle pits, but they failed. Night before last the 
enemy made a dash or charge on our line, and the Fourteenth 
Illinois and parts of the Fifteenth Illinois disgracefully aban- 
doned the ditches and broke in confusion to the rear and gave the 
enemy possession of our rifle pits. This was about three hundred 
yards in front of two 64-pound guns and the Fifth Ohio Battery- 
We came near losing our artillery, and in fact, the enemy could 
have taken our guns if they had pushed ahead without halting. 
Our regiment was on duty three or four hundred yards from the 
enemy's works when the attack was made. Our boys threw down 
the spades and picks, shouldered their guns, and held their ground, 
and then took the ground abandoned by the Fourteenth Illinois 
and held the pits until morning. The attack was made about 
midnight. The Fifty-third stands high, for she more than held 
her own. The enemy makes efforts almost every night to take 
our batteries, or some of them, and spike the guns. 

You will see before this reaches you that we attacked them 
on the 20th inst., simultaneously all along the line. We went 
into the rifle pits at dark the evening before the attack, and at 
break of day every piece of artillery we have in position opened 
out. Being on duty, we were between our artillery and the enemy 
and had a good chance to witness the whole thing. The cannon- 
ading was fierce beyond all description. Woe unto the Rebel 
that showed his head above the works during the cannonading, 
for there were always a hundred rifles to drive at him. The 



BEFORE VICKSBURG 223 

infantry kept the enemy quiet after an hour or three quarters, 
except an occasional shot, and our artillery had their own way. 
It was General Grant's order that the fire should continue for 
six hours without intermission. We did them a great deal of 
damage, but how much I can't say. 

The health of the regiment is not good. We have more sick 
men now than we have had before for twelve months, but the 
sickness, with a few exceptions, is not of a dangerous character. 
It is mostly chills and fever, and I think is brought on by the hot 
days and cold nights. The boys work every night until they get 
into a profuse perspiration, and when they rest they cool off too 
suddenly. We report 45 men sick and unfit for duty. I work 
hard to keep them on their feet and in good spirits. I visit the 
hospital every day and cheer the sick up. More can be done 
that way than you would imagine. The Fourteenth Illinois 
has 75 sick, the Twenty-eighth has 65, the Twelfth Wisconsin 
with 700 men has 156, the Thirty-third Wisconsin about the same 
way. We are better off than any other regiment in the division. 
Our boys have a great deal of will, and that is everything. 

I have just heard that Lee is in Pennsylvania and that 
Hooker is falling back on Washington. I hope it is true, for I 
want something done that will make the North realize what is 
going on. I hope Lee will get into Philadelphia. If Lee should 
lay waste the half of Pennsylvania, it would result in good to us. 
I want to see the whole North feel just as the South does, that 
the enemy must be conquered at all hazards. 

In Camp near Vicksburg, 

June 28, 1863 

I am satisfied now that it was nothing but heavy duty that 
made the boys sick. For ten days the whole or half the regiment 
has been on duty without any rest. It is terrible to stand out in 
the rifle pits in the broiling sun all day. We have been in some 
close places since I wrote you last. Thursday evening I received 
an order to detail 200 men from my regiment and one field officer 
for the work, and open the ditch if possible that the enemy 
took from the Fourteenth Illinois and afterwards filled up. The 
pit was taken from them Monday night, and our men (not the 
Fifty-third) had tried to take the ground and open the pit Tuesday 



224 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

night and again Wednesday night, but the Rebs knew the impor- 
tance of preventing our men from getting the position a second 
time, and they were ready and our boys fell back. 

At the appointed time I reported with my men, and as soon 
as it was dark enough, I advanced cautiously to the place, each 
man armed witli his guns and a spade or pick. I had given the 
boys orders to keep quiet and avoid talking, and under no circum- 
stances to fire a gun until I gave the order. We advanced under 
cover of the hills until we got within about loo or 150 yards of 
where we were to work, and then got down and crawled up. I 
went up at the head of the column. I had just got the boys on 
the line — in fact, the left was not yet in position — when the enemy 
opened a deadly fire on the then right companies. A, C, and H. 
I happened to be with these companies when the fire opened, and 
I had difficulty to prevent the boys from returning the fire. Not- 
withstanding the heavy fire of the enemy, in good range and no 
cover, I put the boys to work. They had to lie on their stomachs 
and use the spades in front of them until they got a hole big enough 
to cover their bodies. In less than ten minutes I sent six men to 
the rear, wounded, including Captain Wakefield. We were with- 
in 75 or 100 yards of a large Rebel fort that is so high that the 
shadow of the fort extended as far as our pit, and the Rebels, 
not eliciting a return fire from us, concluded we had been driven 
back as iisual. But they were badly mistaken, for in three 
hours we had the old pit open and extended to the left 200 yards 
further. 

When the bo}'s got the work far enough advanced to afford 
them cover, they called out to the Rebels to come on. They 
dared them out, but it was all in vain. I was anxious for the 
Rebs to make a charge on us, as they had on the Fourteenth, for 
I knew we could send them back in dismay, and I wanted to 
punish them for what they had done to our boys. The wounded 
boys will all, but one, get well, Fred Nolla of Company C; 
he will die. 

The bullets flew around me but I was not touched. I believe 
I could have held the boys under fire until every man was shot, 
for they never faltered. It requires more nerve to face fire after 
night than in the day. The aft'air has set our boys right up in 
the division. The engineer said it was the most daring thing 



BEFORE VICKSBURG 225 

that had been done in the division, and it is. General Lauman 
was highly pleased. 

Headquarters, 53D Indiana Volunteers, 

Near Vicksburg, July 2, 1863 

I hope the Rebel raiders have not scared you out of your wits. 
By the way, I see the Rebels have made quite a little raid into 
Indiana, but it didn't amount to much after all. How did the 
people about Corydon take it ? I ain glad all the scoundrels were 
punished for their boldness. Don't think you need to have any 
fears of extensive raids into Indiana; not unless things change 
very much from what they are now. I am not satisfied that it 
would not have a salutary effect if a Rebel army would invade 
Indiana and live in the State a few months. It would bring some 
of the Rebel sympathizers to their senses. 

I have heard nothing new on the line for several days. The 
weather is very warm, but not so warm as you folks at home 
imagine. I have suffered more from the heat in Indiana than I 
have since we arrived here. I saw General Grant day before yes- 
terday. He has convened a military commission and has made 
me president of it. He says I will go to General Sherman soon — 
that there is no doubt about it — but that our part of the line is too 
weak for me to leave just now. 

Near Vicksburg, 

July 4, 1863 

Vicksburg is ours. The enemy sent out a flag of truce yes- 
terday about 10 A. M. Hostilities were immediately sus])ended, 
but General Grant and General Pemberton were not able to come 
to terms until 10 o'clock this morning. I saw the Rebels march 
out and strike their arms. 

I went over to their works immediately in our front, and found 
several old college mates. One of them, O'Reilly, captain of a 
battery, almost shed tears. He recognized me as soon as he 
saw me, and came running up to me and exclaimed, "Wat! My 
God, is that you ? Have we been fighting each other ^ I wouldn't 
have killed you, and known it, for the world!" The whole party 
seemed rejoiced to meet me, and I believe they were .sincere. 
O'Reilly had a magnificent battery, and although I hate treason 



226 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

and will never compromise with it as long as I live, I could not 
help feeling bad for him, for with me the ties of friendship have 
always been strong. We are now under marching orders. 

Our corps, four divisions, joins General Sherman on Black 
River, and a movement will then be made on Joe Johnston. In 
the same telegram announcing the surrender our corps received 
orders to be ready to march after Johnston. We will go to-night 
— that is, we will start. I have no time to write now. Mr. 
(Chaplain) Curey will deliver this letter to you. 

Headquarters, 53D Indiana Volunteers, 

Big Black River, July 6, 1863 

I have no time to write you at length. I send this by Lieu- 
tenant-Colonel Thorton of Leavenworth, who goes home, having 
resigned on account of ill health. Yesterday evening we arrived 
here, fifteen miles east of Vicksburg at the bridge over Big Black. 
We move at 5 o'clock in the morning toward Jackson. Johnston 
is some six miles ahead of us now. He will retreat to-morrow 
morning or we will have a fight with him. General Sherman com- 
mands our force — three army corps. I cannot say how far we 
will go into the interior. Rumor says we are going to Chatta- 
nooga to help Rosecrans, but I doubt it. We started at 10 o'clock 
yesterday and marched eighteen miles through the heat and dust 
until sundown. What do you think of this? We only had six 
men less than we started with when we stacked arms. Many 
regiments had less than one-half the men that they started with 
when they stacked arms. Better soldiers than the Fifty-third 
never lived. Major Vestal was left at Vicksburg sick, but I look 
for him to-morrow. He is a very fine officer and I think a great 
deal of him. 

My health is fine. We left quite a number of sick men at 
Vicksburg. They were men who had been worked down during 
the siege. 

Vicksburg, Miss., 

July 22, 1863 
I have an opportunity to write a note that will go direct to 
you by a discharged soldier. 

General Sherman told me yesterday that General Grant had 



BEFORE VICKSBURG 227 

recommended me for a promotion. Don't say anything about it, 
for I might not succeed. General Grant has recommended me 
without ever saying a word to me on the subject, and I feel grati- 
fied, for it shows that he thinks I am deser\4ng. If I am pro- 
moted I may be at home a short time before being assigned to a 
command. 

Don't be discouraged because Morgan captured Corydon. 
I tell you the Southern Confederacy is fast playing out, and we 
will destroy their army as we are going in the interior of their 
country. You need not fear Morgan. I think he is captured 
by this time. Do not despond, for I expect to spend a good many 
pleasant days with you yet. 

ViCKSBURG, Miss., 

July 24, 1S63 
We arrived here yesterday, marching from Jackson by way 
of Raymond, a distance of more than fifty miles in two days and 
a half. The day before yesterday we marched twenty-two miles 
with mercury above 100. It was an awful march. Never did 
the Fifty-third show its superiority over other regiments as it has 
on this march. I brought every one of my men through, while 
other regiments have scores of stragglers behind yet. On arriv- 
ing here I found two letters from you of the 5th and 12th insts., 
the latter giving an account of the Morgan raid. How I would like 
to have been there with the Fifty-third and a few more of the same 
sort. I would give anything in the world to get after Morgan. 

ViCKSBURG, Miss., 

August 4, 1863 
I expect a commission as brigadier-general in a short time 
and it is important that I should be here when it arrives so that 
I can get a good command. I am still in good health. We go 
to Natchez this week. 

ViCKSBURG, Miss., 
August 7, 1863 
I could have been advanced long ago if I had surrendered my 
manhood and had been a sycophant. But that I will never do. 
I fought my way up in spite of some unscrupulous scoundrels at 



2 28 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

home who have exerted themselves to keep me down. I have 
served my country long and faithfully under men whom I knew 
to be my inferiors, but light is at last dawning. I will not be 
indebted to governors, congressmen, or any other civil magis- 
trates for promotion, as more than one-half the generals are. 

Since Morgan and his men have all been captured I hope 
you are in better siDirits. I can see a great deal to encourage us. 
In the last three months the Rebels have lost over 100,000 men. 
They have been defeated everywhere. Remember where the 
Union army was at the beginning of the war, then think where it 
is now. We have cut the Confederacy in twain and the people 
of the South are out of heart and say they want peace on any 
terms. I know this is so. Even here in Mississippi where trea- 
son was respectable for years before the war, the people say 
they are whipped and see nothing ahead but total destniction if 
the war is not terminated. 



CHAPTER XV 
MORGAN'S RAID 



MORGAN S REASONS FOR HIS RAID INTO INDIANA 

COUNTED ON AID FROM SYMPATHIZERS NORTH OF THE OHIO 
RIVER — MORGAN CAPTURES TWO STEAMERS AND CROSSES 
THE RIVER — THE DEFENSE OF CORYDON — -CARE OF CON- 
FEDERATE WOUXDED. 

TT was several days after the Fourth of July, the day 
-■■ Vicksburg fell, before we heard of it, even by tele- 
gram. Meanwhile, and before some of the preceding 
letters came to me from Vicksburg, General John Morgan 
had passed through Corydon, closely pursued by his Ken- 
tucky neighbor, General Hobson, commanding the Union 
cavalry. 

From the beginning of the war there had been appre- 
hensions at Corydon of a guerrilla expedition, or an invasion 
from the South. Several times we were roused at night 
and prepared to leave our homes because of a supposed 
night attack on the town. Late in the Spring of 1863, 
there were continual rumors that the Confederate General 
John Morgan, of Lexington, Kentucky, and his command 
of cavalry would invade our county. Some young Ken- 
tuckians visiting Corydon at this time were regarded as 
spies, for it was known that practically all of the young men 
of Kentucky were in the Rebel or Union army. A short 
time before Morgan appeared, Henry Crutcher, of Meade 
County, Kentucky, made a visit to his cousin, Edward 
Aydelotte. Henry was particularly fond of horseback riding 
with the young ladies of the town, especially with his 
cousin, Mollie Jordan, the daughter of David Jordan, who 
lived directly opposite us. They rode over all the river 
roads to the south and the crossroads — the Mauckport 

229 



230 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

Road due south, the Amsterdam Road to the southwest, 
and the Laconia Road to the southeast, and north of Cory- 
don on the Salem Road. 

The first man of Morgan's command to enter the town 
was Henry Crutcher. He led a party in on the New 
Albany Road from the east. Toward evening as they 
were moving out of town on the Salem Road, Henry 
stopped to pay his respects to Mollie. 

"I haven't time to pay a visit, not even to dismount, 
Cousin MolHe. Won't you give me a cup of water?" 

"No, you Rebel; go, or Hobson will get you!" was 
her response. 

Undoubtedly Morgan was deceived by the reports he 
received as to the aid he would get if he came to the north 
side of the Ohio River. Men who had been pronounced 
in their views that the seceding States should be permitted 
to depart in peace, who were opposed to emancipation, 
shouldered their squirrel rifles "to meet the invaders of 
our homes." These invaders they afterwards denounced 
as thieves and robbers for appropriating all of the fresh 
horses within five or six miles of the fine of march, for 
levying and exacting a tribute of $2,100 on the three flour 
mifls, for entering the stores and taking boots, socks, and 
all necessary edibles. In place of the good horses they 
took they left their ridden-down Kentucky thoroughbreds. 
Samuel J. Wright's losses, including the tribute he paid on 
his mill, amounted to $5,000; those of Douglass and Denbo 
to $3,500. William Hisey concealed $690 in a drawer in 
his house, but it was found and taken when the house was 
entered. This was "living off the country" — war. 

General Basil Duke, Morgan's second in command, said 
they met more resistance at Corydon than at any other 
point on their ride from Brandenburg to Buffington's Ford, 
Ohio, where they attempted to cross the Ohio River into 
Virginia. It was told me by Colonel Bowles, who com- 
manded one of the Kentucky regiments, that their original 



MORGAN S RAID 231 

intention was to get to Pennyslvania and join General Lee. 

In all, according to Basil Duke, Morgan had 3,000 men. 
Years afterward I heard men who were with Morgan say 
that 4,000 men confronted them at Cory don. As a matter 
of fact there were but 600, 300 volunteers and 300 Home 
Guards. While the Cory don fight was only a skirmish, 
it illustrates the fact that a few undisciplined men with 
arms in their hands can and sometimes will withstand the 
advance of a superior force. 

On the evening of July 7 (Tuesday) General Morgan 
appeared at Brandenburg and captured two steamers, the 
T. J. McComh and the Alice Dean. Lieutenant-Colonel 
William J. Irwin of the "Indiana Legion" or Home 
Guards at Alton heard of it and immediately sent to Leav- 
enworth, by the steamer Lady Pike, for a six-pound gun 
and the Home Guards at that point, and dispatched a 
courier to Colonel Jordan at Corydon for reinforcements 
to come to the river and help prevent Morgan from cross- 
ing. It was early evening when the rider galloped into 
Corydon and soon we were all in confusion; women and 
children were in the streets prepared to leave. 

By midnight the Lady Pike was back at Alton with 
the gun from Leavenworth, and a company in command 
of Captain Lynn and Colonel Woodbury to man it. Be- 
fore sunrise the gun had been dragged across the county 
and was in position opposite Brandenburg. There were 
also present Captains Farquhar's, Hufman's, and Hayes' 
companies of the Indiana Legion or Home Guards; in all 
about one hundred men. 

As soon as there was any lifting of the fog, which hung 
long after the sun rose. Colonel Irwin ordered the six- 
pounder to be directed at the boilers of the McComh and 
the Dean, and fired with a view to either disabling or 
sinking these boats and thus preventing the crossing of the 
raiders. Both boats were crowded with men. But one line 
shot had been fired, passing directly over the bow of the 



232 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

Dean, and there was a scurrying ashore when Provost- 
Marshal John Timberlake, former Colonel of the Eighty- 
first Indiana, appeared on the scene and, claiming to be 
the ranking officer, said it would not do to destroy or sink 
the property of the United States — the McComb was 
a government transport — and insisted on firing on the 
Confederate cavalry who were on the high ground at the 
west of the town. This was done with good effect, killing 
several and wounding more. In this fire the Home Guards 
joined. But soon two of Morgan's batteries, one at the 
Brandenburg court house and the other toward the lower 
end of the town, and the infantry opened on the six-pounder, 
and under cover of this fire the boats crossed and landed a 
large body of men who speedily drove the Home Guards 
from the field, with the loss of three killed and four wounded, 
and their cannon. 

Upon landing on the Indiana side General Morgan said: 
"That was the tightest box I was ever in." General Hob- 
son was coming up in his rear, and had the boats been 
destroyed, he would probably have met the fate he did 
later at Buffington's Ford. He might have forded at the 
bar above Brandenburg, but he never could have brought 
his artillery across. He made special inquiry for the Home 
Guards with the Springfield rifles, but was never able to 
find them. 

By retreating slowly on the Cory don Road and felling 
trees to obstruct as much as possible the progress of Mor- 
gan's cavalry. Colonels Irwin and Timberlake hoped that 
aid from New Albany would reach them, but it did not 
come. "Not deterred by this neglect of the New Albany 
Home Guards, or the overpowering force in our front," 
said one, "we gathered to the number of three hundred 
Home Guards and citizens and marched on Wednesday 
afternoon four miles south of Corydon on the Mauckport 
Road to meet the invaders." They called themselves "in- 
fantry and cavalry." Here the infantry remained until 



MORGAN S RAID 233 

10 P. M., when they returned to town, and again there was 
a night of turmoil and hysterical women. The cavalry 
under Major Jacob Pfrimmer and mounted citizens to the 
number of one hundred remained behind on all the roads 
leading to the river to watch the approach of the enemy. 
The next morning Major Pfrimmer and his men charged 
a party of Morgan's scouts and captured twelve of them. 

Much indignation was expressed at a party of Morgan's 
men shooting down John Glenn and burning his house. 
But the old man was fooHsh enough or brave enough to 
walk out of his house alone and fire into the approaching 
Confederates. The only property burned was Lopp's Mill 
on Buck Creek. 

About II A. M. on Thursday, July 9, the report came 
to town that Morgan's main force was approaching on the 
Mauckport Road, with skirmishers out on either side. 
The Home Guards and citizens to the number of six hun- 
dred, under the command of Colonel Louis Jordan, assisted 
by Colonel Timberlake and Major Jacob Pfrimmer, formed 
what they called a line of battle on the hill one mile south 
of Corydon, reaching from Amsterdam Road on the right 
to Laconia Road on the left or east, with the Mauckport 
Road in the center. My brother. Major McGrain, was in 
command of a company armed with Henry rifles on the 
extreme right of the line on the Amsterdam Road. 

Temporary breastworks made of fallen logs and fence 
rails, together with the lay of the ground and the timber 
and underbrush, made it difficult for Morgan to make a direct 
attack. But still he came that way. He approached on 
the left in small force, but was repulsed by Captain George 
LaHue's company; then after he had advanced his main 
force up the Mauckport Road, he saw that a direct attack 
would cost too many lives, so he covered both flanks at the 
same time, "which made it necessary," one of the volun- 
teers informed me, "for us in the center to fall back." 
"This," he further said, "was done, not with the best of 



234 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

order, but with excellent speed, for, you know, our infantry 
were mostly undrilled." On the Amsterdam Road, where 
my brother commanded the "Henry Rifles" and thirty or 
forty men armed with ordinary squirrel rifles, he and his 
men claimed to have held Morgan's cavalry in check until 
artillery was brought to bear on them and they were flanked 
out with a dismounted force. 

The "infantry" fell back to the town, while the "cav- 
alry" made good their escape. Morgan then occupied the 
hill and began throwing shells into the center of the street 
in front of the court house. He also flanked the town to 
the east and the west. Colonel Jordan, seeing that further 
resistance would be useless and would result in the destruc- 
tion of the town, hoisted the white flag. The Home Guard 
losses were 3 killed, 2 wounded, and 300 prisoners; the lat- 
ter, after several hours, were paroled. Morgan's losses were 
18 killed and 33 wounded. General Morgan arrived in 
time for a late dinner, and held possession of the town 
until night. 

"Cedar Glade," my father's house, was about half a mile 
north of the town, on the Salem Road, which was a con- 
tinuation of the street into which ran the Mauckport Road 
from the south, on which Morgan's column advanced. To 
my father's house in the forenoon, as soon as the firing 
began, most of the women of the town betook themselves 
with their children and as many belongings as they could 
carry. The house had a large cellar, but not large enough 
for all the women and children who had sought refuge 
there; they overflowed the house and lawn. Between this 
house and the town there was a hill, so we had no view of 
what was going on. But soon after I reached my father's 
house we heard the sound of artillery. We saw those of 
the Home Guards who did not remain in town to surrender, 
run past to the flelds and hills beyond. Some of them 
threw away their guns as they ran. Dr. Slemmons had a 
fine Spencer rifle, which he threw into a meadow opposite 



MORGAN S RAID 235 

US as he ran past; the next morning he walked out and 
picked it up. 

Some of the cannon balls tore through the trees near 
my father's house after passing over the town, as they were 
fired from an elevation to the south of the town. At this 
many of the women gave wa}^ to shrieks, and the larger 
they were, the more alarmed they were. But the irre- 
pressible small boy threw up his hat in glee and yelled, 
"The Rebels are coming, the Rebels are coming to town." 

The women had left their houses unprotected, and some 
of them, in their fright, brought more things away than they 
could carry back after the troops had passed. While they 
were gone Morgan's men went through some of the unpro- 
tected houses, ransacking bureaus and closets, and taking 
what they could carry. Where the families remained at 
home the houses were not sacked; but as our men did in 
the South, Confederate officers and men billeted themselves 
on the households for the six or eight hours they remained. 
They offered to pay, but only in Confederate money. 

Mr. T. C. Slaughter, my husband's old law partner, 
was at Paoli when Morgan crossed at Brandenburg on 
Wednesday morning. That afternoon he drove over to 
Orleans and took the Monon Railroad into New Albany. 
He got out his squirrel rifle, joined the "Henry Rifles" under 
Major McGrain, and fired sixteen rounds before they re- 
treated into town, where he was captured. During his 
captivity Captain Slaughter of General Morgan's artillery 
hunted him up and claimed kinship, which Mr. Slaughter 
said, though distant, existed. This incident of the Ken- 
tucky captain's calling on Mr. Slaughter gave rise to the 
report that Slaughter suffered less loss than any of the 
other large property owners of the town, and the fact is, 
his losses were very slight. Blood is thicker than water, 
the gossips said. 

The sword which the officers and men of the Fifty-third 
Indiana had presented to my husband and which he had 



236 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

sent home, I concealed in a stovepipe before I started to 
my father's house, shortly before noon. Toward evening 
the excitement at "Cedar Glade" subsided and I concluded 
to return to my home to look after it, and with a view to 
remaining there during the night, as I felt there would be 
no danger. Moreover, I thought of the action of our 
soldiers at Collierville in using the fence paHng for kindling 
for their bivouac fires, and feared that if Morgan's com- 
mand remained that night in Corydon and I was not there 
to protect them, our fences might be appropriated for a like 
purpose. 

At the edge of the town, but two or three blocks from 
my home, I met Morgan's advance guard. Before the 
entire body had passed, two young officers fell out of hne 
and addressed me — a Captain Simmons and Lieutenant 
Brown, who were brothers of schoolmates of my sister Lyde 
and myself at Beardstown, Kentucky. They asked me 
where my husband was, and I told them, "In the Yankee 
army, fighting you fellows." I offered them the hospi- 
tahty of the house if they would remain over night, for I 
knew that with them as my guests I and my fence would 
be safe. They thanked me and said, "We most certainly 
would be glad to accept, but you don't seem to perceive 
we are somewhat in a hurry." The rear of their column 
had disappeared over the hill. They bade me good-bye 
and went on at a gallop. A son of Captain Simmons after- 
wards came to Chicago, and my husband secured him a 
situation. I found everything intact at my house, but 
instead of staying there that night, I yielded to the en- 
treaties of the Jordans and passed the night with them. 
Troops and stragglers were passing all night. 

General Morgan improvised the Corydon Presbyterian 
Church into a hospital for his wounded. Those who were 
strong enough to be moved were sent in a few days to New 
Albany, but those who were seriously wounded were com- 
pelled to remain in the church. My sister, Jane Anna, and 



MORGAN S RAID 



237 



I nursed one, Albert Womack, a mere boy, only seven- 
teen, small and delicate for his years. He was desperately 
wounded and died in a few days. His home was in Mc- 
Minnville, Tennessee. In his delirium the boy revealed 
the family secrets and the refinement of his Tennessee 
home. When we first went to him he had on a dirty 
flannel shirt and asked to have a white one. We washed 
him and put on him one of my husband's best white shirts. 
From the fact that my father was a Secessionist, the action 
of my sister and myself in nursing this boy created a good 
deal of talk, and still more when he was buried in the Cory- 
don Cemetery in a shirt on which appeared the name of 
my husband, who had a short time before been promoted 
to be a brigadier-general for services at Vicksburg. 

Benjamin Q. A. Gresham, my husband's eldest brother, 
then a major in the Third Indiana Cavalry, was home 
on furlough recovering from a wound. In uniform he was 
the handsomest officer I saw during the war, but without 
any trace of that consciousness that too often mars manly 
beauty. In the disguise of a farmer he entered Morgan's 
lines and spent the afternoon with him and the troops in 
Corydon. Later in the day, when he wished to leave town, 
in order to report to the authorities at Indianapolis what 
he had seen and what he understood to be Morgan's plan, 
he applied to Morgan for a pass to permit him to go through 
the Confederate lines. He told Morgan he lived ten miles 
east on the New Albany plank road, which for several miles 
was in possession of Morgan's men, and said, "I have a 
very sick boy at home and came here for medicine for him 
— nux vomica." After some conversation about the boy, 
Morgan asked his age, and whether there was a doctor at 
Lanesville. "Morgan looked hard at me, saying, 'I 
think it is a damn strange thing for you to ride ten miles 
for a little bottle of medicine like that, but if your boy is 
sick, as you say, I guess I will have to pass you through,'" 
and he did. Ben laughed and added, "Morgan is a good 

16 



238 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

fellow. I think he suspected me of being a spy, but I knew 
he had no time then to stop and shoot or hang me." 
Instead of stopping at Lanesville, Ben rode through to 
New Albany, and telegraphed Governor Morton his im- 
pressions of Morgan and his force. 



CHAPTER XVI 
NATCHEZ IN 18G3 



COLONIAL HOMES OF NATCHEZ ROSALIE, GRANTS 

HEADQUARTERS GRESHAM IN COMMAND OF NATCHEZ COT- 
TON A CAUSE OF DOWNFALL OF CONFEDERACY EFFECT OF 

ENLISTMENT OF NEGROES — GRESHAM ENFORCES LAW AND 
ORDER— PRESERVES RIGHTS OF NONCOMBATANTS PROC- 
LAMATION OF AMNESTY AND PARDON MORTALITY AMONG 

CONTRABANDS WHO FLOCKED TO THE TOWNS — -RECON- 
STRUCTION BEGUN. 

TN the latter part of August, 1863, I started for Vicks- 
-'- burg to visit "My Gineral." There was still plenty 
of secessionist sentiment in my family. My younger sister 
Zetta, who was devoted to my husband, dubbed him "My 
Gineral." The river was low and it was a journey by 
light draft boat to Memphis, where we transferred to another 
for Vicksburg. We were a week on the way, and I became 
sick from drinking the river water. Before reaching Mem- 
phis there was much talk on the boat that below Memphis 
boats were set on fire by emissaries of the Confederacy or 
fired on from the bank, but I went through without incident. 
On the arrival of the boat at Vicksburg I was met by 
several officers whom I had known at Collier ville.' They 
brought me word that my husband was at Natchez and 
for me to go on to that point. As it would take most of 
the day and part of the night for the boat to unload the 
Vicksburg cargo, I accepted their invitation to drive about 
the town and out to the fortifications and trenches. It 
was early September, sixty days after the surrender, and 
some of the streets were still barricaded. In those that 
were open there were hats, rubbish, old clothes, and parts 

iSee page 215. 

239 



240 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

of wagons and caissons. The caves in the chalk-hke clay 
hills, in which the Vicksburg people lived during the siege, 
were pointed out. Then we drove out to the line of forts 
and the trenches of the besieged, and the line of General 
Grant's army with its trenches and parallels as it was 
posted when General Pemberton surrendered. To the 
southeast of the city was the position of my husband's 
regiment, now marked by a tablet. 

Beyond to the east was indicated the line of that part 
of General Grant's army which had formed "a face front 
to the rear, to meet the threatened approach of Joe John- 
ston's army." Even a woman, on the ground with the 
panorama before her, could appreciate the genius that 
conceived the plan, and the force and energy that exe- 
cuted it. 

Early next morning we were at Natchez. My husband 
was on the boat, up in the cabin, and greeting me before 
I was ready to leave. I was struck with his lean appear- 
ance. He had not yet recovered from the exposure in the 
trenches at Vicksburg. He admitted then, what he had 
not written about himself but about others, that the ex- 
posure in the trenches had brought on indigestion and 
malaria. "Most of the clothes we wore during the siege 
we burned," he said. 

When I first saw it, Natchez was a beautiful place, and 
still is, although then showing traces of the ravages of the 
war. There was "Natchez on the Bluff" and "Natchez 
under the Hill" at the landing. At the time of my first 
visit, "Natchez under the Hill" was a famous place with 
its wharf, boats, warehouses, stores and hotels, and haunts 
of vice. Up an inclined cut, in the side of the chalky bluff 
which rises 170 feet above the river, is the road or street 
leading to Natchez proper. At the top is a park command- 
ing a view — none finer on the Mississippi — down the river 
for miles, and up the river a short distance to where it dis- 
appears behind a bend to the west twenty miles around, 



NATCHEZ IN 186 3 241 

only to appear again across a narrow neck, about two and 
one-half miles to the north. Westward across the river 
for many miles the fertile bottom fields of Louisiana are 
in view. Facing the park were beautiful residences and 
farther back was the business part of the city. 

July 13, 1863, General Grant went to Natchez and made 
his headquarters in "RosaHe," the handsomest of the resi- 
dences on the park I have just described. "Rosalie" was 
built in 1823 and takes its name from the French fort of 
that name that was destroyed by the Natchez Indians in 
1729, when all the French settlers were massacred. Several 
hundred feet to the south of the mansion, on what was 
then part of its lawn, were the remains of the old fort, 
right on the crest of the bluff. 

General Grant remained but a few days at Natchez. 
He left Brigadier-General M. M. Crocker, commanding the 
Fourth Division of the Seventeenth i\rmy Corps, in com- 
mand of the District of Natchez, which included as much 
of the territory of Louisiana and Mississippi adjacent to 
the river as he could cover. 

August 26, 1863, my husband reported to General 
Crocker and was assigned to the command of the Third 
Brigade, Fourth Division, Seventeenth Army Corps, with 
headquarters at "Rosahe.'" Included in his command was 
the city of Natchez, so that from the first he was brought 
into close contact with its people. 

Up the incline and through the park to "Rosalie" I 
was conducted. Its lawns to the rear, the site of the old 
fort, and beyond, were covered with tents. A sumptuous 
breakfast awaited me. 

On the boats from Cairo to Natchez there had been a 
handsome young officer with red hair who attracted much 
attention by the way he played poker and drank whiskey. 
When he was presented to me at breakfast as Captain 
Norton of the Twelfth Wisconsin and a member of my 
husband's staff, I recognized him at once and caused some 



242 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

amusement by relating the circumstances under which I 
had seen him on the boat. Although my husband was 
always temperate himself, a fact to which the doctors after- 
wards attributed their ability to save his leg and his life, 
the use of wine and whiskey — almost universal in the army 
— was no bar to my husband's favor; certainly not so long 
as those who drank it did not incapacitate themselves for 
duty. At "Rosalie" I learned the game of poker. 

One of the members of my husband's staff was Captain 
George S. Babbitt of the Twenty-third Indiana. The 
entire antithesis of Daniel G. Griffin of the Thirty-eighth 
Indiana, whom my husband described as the most perfect 
man he had ever met, Babbitt was Griffin's most intimate 
friend. They occupied bachelor quarters in New Albany. 
How two men so different could be such friends was one 
of the mysteries. Babbitt, it was said, was like John A. 
Rawlins, proficient in the language that made the army in 
Flanders famous. He was a native of Michigan and had 
come to New Albany as a civil engineer in the employ of 
the Louisville, New Albany & Chicago Railroad Company, 
had graduated from the "Anderson Rifles" as an officer into 
the Twenty-third Indiana Volunteers when it was organized 
in New Albany in June, July, and August, 1861. Daniel G. 
Griffin was captain of the "Anderson Rifles" until he went 
into the Thirty-eighth. William L. Sanderson had been 
mayor of New Albany, was one of its leading and most 
respected citizens, and had passed middle life when he was 
commissioned Colonel of the Twenty-third. Very dignified, 
he had not much patience with the young fellows, among 
whom Babbitt was the leader, who after marching all day 
would play cards and drink whiskey a good part of the night. 
Babbitt was but a Httle over twenty-five and was one of 
the brightest and ablest men of his years I ever met. His 
energy and his brains were what my husband liked in him. 
Moreover, his duties as chief executive officer of the man 
who had almost unlimited power in the district, left him 



NATCHEZ IN 1863 243 

but little time for play. With the soldiers, the planters of 
Natchez, and the ex-Confederates whose wounds had dis- 
abled them for further service, Babbitt was most popular. 
There was much cheer, many cigars and toddies at these 
headquarters, and when it came to hospitality, no South- 
ern man could be more cordial than my husband. Indeed, 
he was always rated as one of them. And in his absence 
Babbitt would do the honors. It was Babbitt's great 
pleasure to crowd the colonel of a regiment along, and his 
special delight to prod up "Coon vSanderson," as he always 
spoke of Colonel Sanderson. Most considerate of the sensi- 
bilities of women, he never made war on them. Before 
the close of the great conflict which Babbitt did not long 
survive, for he burnt the candle at both ends, he was 
made a colonel, as were also Captain Norton of the Twelfth 
Wisconsin and A. V. Duncan, another bright man. These 
three made up my husband's staff. Captain Cadle of an 
Iowa regiment, a handsome young officer, afterwards a 
colonel, was Crocker's adjutant-general. Babbitt, Norton, 
and Cadle were popular with the young ladies of Natchez, 
and when it came to a flirtation there was neither blue nor 
gray. 

A. L. Wilson, the owner of "Rosalie," a man of affairs 
and affluence, before the coming of the Yankees had taken 
his slaves and gone to Texas in the hope of saving them. 
He believed, as did others, that he might escape the pains 
and penalties of the Confiscation Act and the effects of the 
Emancipation Proclamation. 

Mrs. Wilson and her daughter, an only child, a demure 
miss whom our officers much respected, occupied all the 
upper part of the house except one of the front rooms, 
which was mine. Miss Wilson, then just out of school, was 
devoted to a Captain S. E. Rumble who was in the Con- 
federate army. After the war he and Miss Wilson were 
married, and since then I have enjoyed their hospitality 
and that of their charming family at "Rosalie." All 



244 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

the lower floor except the dining room of General Grant 
was used for the executive offices . The dining room my 
husband and his staff used as their mess room. Mrs. 
Wilson and her daughter used one of the upper rooms as 
their dining room; their food was largely suppHed by our 
mess. 

Contrary to the old adage that two women cannot live 
in the same house and be friends, Mrs. Wilson and I were 
most congenial. I never let her forget that I recognized 
that it was her house. The exigencies of the war did not 
alter that fact. It always seemed hard to me to make a 
private residence army headquarters or the lodging place 
for officers. However, in the latter instance it was a pro- 
tection when the Union officer was the right kind of man. 
Though vSecessionist to the core, on one occasion Mrs. 
Wilson gave way to her feelings : "I would like to stand by 
and see the first man who uttered the word secession have 
his tongue pulled out. Before the war," she added, "the 
world was beautiful to us." But she was always my hus- 
band's friend, and after he moved his headquarters to the 
business part of the city he frequently called on her, when 
she would always insist on his remaining for the night and 
occupying the room which she always kept for him. 

Even the Natchez Indians, from whom the place de- 
rived its name, were far in advance of most of our aborig- 
ines in civilization. The place seemed to breathe culture. 

In ante-bellum days the Mississippi, except the high- 
ways leading to the east, was the only artery of commerce 
and, as presaging what may come again, ocean steamers 
in those days came to the levee and cotton was shipped 
direct to Liverpool. When the war broke out there were 
no less than six miUionaires living in Natchez and its en- 
virons in Adams County. Their plantations were large- 
ly in Concordia and Tensas parishes across the river in 
Louisiana. Hospitable by nature, these men were almost 
universally cordial to my husband. 



NATCHEZ IN 1803 245 

The planters dwelt in mansions built on the most beau- 
tiful lines of architecture, with broad verandas or galleries 
supported by noble columns. The best lines of all the 
Colonial homes I have ever seen in America are those of 
"Stanton Hall," finished by Frederick Stanton in 1858. 
Most of these residences were built early in the nine- 
teenth century. In all there were forty of these homes in 
Adams County. "Concord," the residence of the Minors 
when I was there, was built by one of the Spanish governors 
in 1784, and it would be a splendid building yet but for the 
ravages of fire. "Laurel Hill" of the Spanish days is still 
standing. In every way in his power my husband aided 
Mrs. Minor. vShe was a widow with a son in the Con- 
federate army. After my husband was wounded, at Mrs. 
Minor's instance he exerted himself to get her son released 
from captivity because of his youth and ill health. Miss 
Kate Minor, who during the World's Fair, as one of the 
"Lady Managers" from Louisiana, won such golden opin- 
ions from all, was then a mere infant. 

On a commanding height overlooking the Mississippi, 
was the "Briars," where Jefferson Davis wooed and won his 
second wife, Miss Varina Howell. We visited and dined 
at "Richmond," an old mansion a short distance down 
the river road. Its construction had been begun in 1784. 
Levin R. Marshall, the owner of "Richmond," a neutral, 
as he is spoken of to-day by people in Natchez, was rated 
by us as a Union man, as is attested by a letter of December 
20, 1863, to my husband from Mrs. Marshall, in which she 
begs on behalf of herself and others, "that the troops will 
not evacuate Vidalia, for if they leave the other side of the 
river our property will almost certainly be destroyed; our 
corn, of which we have plenty, and our mills and gins 
burned, and then our negroes must starve.'' The troops 
stayed, and by every act in his power my husband strove 
to keep the negroes on the plantations. Mr. Marshall's 
two sons and his son-in-law were in the Confederate army. 



246 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

The unmarried daughter, Mary, and the married one, the 
wife of Captain Ogden of General Loring's staff, were 
accomplished women, and very popular with our young 
officers. 

Many of the Southern women in their necessity, after 
the blockade, made their own clothes, hats, and bonnets. 
They braided hats out of straw and did some marvelous 
needle work. Miss Marshall started to braid a hat for 
General Grant, but as he left before it was finished, she 
gave it to General Gresham. It was of such exquisite 
workmanship that I thought it should not be worn, but 
preserved to show subsequently the kind and character 
of the work of the Southern women during the Rebellion. 
In 1903 I gave it to the Chicago Historical Society to be 
preserved with some of the war mementoes of General 
Grant and my husband, with an account of how it came to 
me and the name of the maker. 

Another Union family at Natchez were the Nutts. 
Mr. Haller Nutt was a millionaire when the war began. 
He owned the plantation at Hard Times Landing in Tensas 
Parish on the Louisiana side below Vicksburg. It was to 
Hard Times that General Grant marched his army around 
Vicksburg and landed his boats after they ran the batteries. 
Instead of burning his corn and killing and driving off his 
hogs as others did, he left them to subsist General Grant's 
army. A Virginian by birth, he did not survive the war, 
but his estate was compensated for what our army took, 
but not for the large number of negroes whose freedom 
was contemporaneous with the advent of the United States 
forces. "Longwood," the Nutt home, was about a mile 
and a half out of Natchez to the southeast on the Wood- 
ville Road. When the war began, it was in the process of 
being built anew. The blockade stopped its construction 
as the roof and first story were completed. The interior 
woodwork and furnishings, then at sea, never reached 
Natchez. This first story and the house for the servants, 



NATCHEZ IN 1863 247 

a good dwelling for any one, formed the Nutt abode 
in 1863. Many times we dined there. "Longwood's" 
eighty acres, with sixty servants, were well cared for. In 
the garden were five hundred varieties of roses. Miss 
Carrie Nutt was a charming young woman and deservedly 
popular with all, especially our young officers. It was at 
"Longwood" that vSargent S. Prentiss married Mrs. Will- 
iams and it was there he died. 

Just beyond, on the Woodville Road, is Prentiss's grave 
and that of Winthrop Sargent, one of Washington's soldiers, 
the first secretary of the Northwest Territory by Presi- 
dent Washington's appointment, and the first territorial 
governor of Mississippi, appointed by President Adams and 
removed by President Jefferson. Theodore Roosevelt is 
in error, in "The Winning of the West," in stating that 
Sargent left Mississippi after being removed from office. 
Soon after reaching Natchez Mr. Sargent wooed and won 
a handsome young widow, Mrs. Williams, who had a large 
landed estate. On this they erected the typical mansion 
of Colonial days, which they called "Gloster," and which 
stands to-day within a few hundred yards of Winthrop 
Sargent's grave. His grandson, also Winthrop Sargent, 
unlike many New England men who settled in the South, 
"did not take up," as Mr. Lincoln put it, "with the sophism 
of secession." "Many of our most violent and unreasoning 
Secessionists are men of New England origin," said one of 
our dinner guests on one occasion to my husband. His 
answer was, "They may well be, for they invented it." 
Sargent adhered to his grandfather's FederaHsm. He was 
one of my husband's intimate friends while I was in Natchez. 
Many were the discussions I heard between the two about 
the Northwest Territory, St. Clair, Washington, Adams, 
and Jefferson. After my husband was wounded, Winthrop 
Sargent was one of his regular correspondents. 

To the north and east of "Longwood" and "Gloster" 
on the Liberty Road was "Elmscourt," the handsome 



248 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

home of A. S. Merrill, who was considered a Union man. 
At any rate, some of his property was destroyed by Con- 
federates and on one occasion a detail was sent by the 
Confederate General Wirt Adams to burn his residence, 
but they were driven off. The Merrills were an interest- 
ing and accomplished family. After the war. General 
Grant sent Mr. Merrill to Brussels as our minister. Past 
"Monmouth," the home of General J. M. Quitman, a 
native of New York but one of the most extreme of the 
Secessionists, was "Melrose," the home of Judge McMur- 
ran, the former partner of General Quitman. Judge 
McMurran had gained fame at the bar and with him and 
Mrs. McMurran we had most cordial relations. Judge 
McMurran was one of the Mississippi delegates to the 
convention of 1850 that met at Nashville with a view to 
preventing the admission of California. He was a broad- 
minded, conservative, cultured man. 

Another accomplished family was that of Mr. Samuel 
Davis. He lived just at the edge of town in "Sunnyside," 
his brother Alfred Vidal Davis near by in "Dunleith." As 
I remember it Samuel Davis's family consisted of himself, 
Mrs. Davis and a daughter. He was frank in his secession- 
ist views. He was wealthy and his wine cellar was still 
well stocked with wine that had been imported before the 
war. He gave most elegant and sumptuous dinners. 
Another warm friend my husband made at Natchez was 
Dr. William Byrd Page, a Virginian by birth, who was en- 
joying a large and lucrative practice in Philadelphia when 
Mississippi seceded. His wife, who was a Miss Davis, a 
sister of A. V. and Samuel Davis, had large plantations in 
Louisiana and Mississippi. When the war began, Dr. and 
Mrs. Page moved to Natchez to look after Mrs. Davis's 
property. Their object was to avoid the pains and penal- 
ties of the confiscation acts of the Confederate government. 
They succeeded, as did Dr. and Mrs. Carter who hved in 
Philadelphia before the war, but were sojourning in Natchez 



NATCHEZ IN 186 3 249 

when I was there. After the war they returned to Phila- 
delphia. Mrs. Carter also owned a large plantation in 
Concordia Parish, Louisiana. My husband, w^hose desire 
it was to get them back to the old relation, cared not 
whether it was the stress of circumstances or a prededi- 
cation that caused them to side with the Confederacy. 
When it came to property interests, the noncombatants, 
whether "Yank or Reb," can not now^ be censured for 
having played both ends. The Southern judges were 
better diplomats right in the midst of the war than the 
men in military or executive positions. Men of the class 
of Drs. Page and Carter, the Confederate State Courts 
held, were not hable to the drafts but might be expelled. ^ 
Perhaps the reader and the historians, in view of some of 
the facts and incidents herein set forth, can understand 
how Gresham wanted to end the war at Appomattox. 

"Clifton," the complement of "Rosalie" and built the 
same year, overlooked the river to the north of the park 
from the highest ground in Natchez. It was the home of 
Frank Surget and was then occupied by the Union forces. 
Subsequently — an unnecessary, if not a wanton act — it 
was demolished and a fort constructed on its site. We 
dined with Mr. Surget. He was not living in "Clifton" 
then, but in a house in the center of the city. 

1 News item from one of the Natchez papers of 1864. furnished by Capt. Allen T. 
Bowie. C. S. A.: 

"A few days since, a squad of Rebels came to our lines under Flag of Truce having in 
custody Mr. J. Lengsfield with his wife and six children, who had been, as it appears after the 
usual routine of imprisonment and confiscation of goods, banished 'not to return to the Con- 
federate States during the war.' 

"The family were properly cared for and General Brayman, in pursuance of instructions 
concernmg such cases, selected Judge S. S. Boyd and family to be sent to Brookhaven in return 
After all preparations were made for the departure the friends of Judge Boyd proposed to pay 
Ss.ooo for the benefit and support of refugees and citizens who, like Mr. Lengsfield, may be 
plundered and banished from Rebel neighborhoods for being loyal to the United States flag 
and government. General Brayman made the order accordingly. The result is, Judge Boyd 
remains at home, and the new Mayor begins his poor-fund for the winter with fs.ooo in the 
city treasury." 

The claim of Judge Boyd's relatives and friends is that General Brayman appropriated 
the Ss.ooo to his own use. Jam.es Surget states that he paid the money in currency to Gen- 
eral Brayman, and that it never went into the poor-fund. 

See page 262. 



250 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

Another place that we visited was "Brown's Gardens," 
under the hill, but up the river about opposite "Clifton." 
The gardens of roses were even then immense, but the 
encroachment of the Mississippi had cut them down greatly. 
This place is now the home of Mr. R. F. Learned, who was 
in the Confederate army. After the war he married Miss 
Brown, and I am glad to say that both lived long and 
prospered. Dr. and Mrs. Page made up another charming 
and interesting family, as I have already stated. 

For two months I hved at "RosaHe." Almost always 
at dinner in the middle of the day there was some officer 
or citizen as a guest. At the morning meal the talk was 
unguarded. Often my husband would caution Babbitt and 
Norton that they would be surprised and captured some 
evening when calling on the ladies. "Shop" was talked 
— that is, military movements. But what interested me 
most was to hear my husband discuss the political, social, 
and economical changes the abolition of slavery would 
make. Subsequent events proved that he understood the 
situation. He could expound a legal proposition with a 
clearness that was interesting to all. The Emancipation 
Proclamation was a war measure; it freed only certain 
individuals; it did not change the fundamental law which 
recognized the institution of slavery. "We will have a 
Thirteenth Amendment but it will not be the kind Mr. 
Lincoln offered the slaveholder in 1861 — it will sweep the 
institution from our political and economical system. I 
hope the Southern leaders will end the war and let us pay 
their people something for their niggers — otherwise they 
will get nothing." Sure of the end and conscious of his 
own power and that of the government behind him, Mr. 
Gresham's purpose was always to make it easy to get back 
to the old relations. 

At that table I learned that there was a most extensive 
and efficient secret service. It covered the military and 
poHtical field completely. Some of the women — ladies who 



NATCHEZ IN 1863 251 

were receiving courtesies and rations at our hands — were 
secretly aiding the enemy. They never knew that Walter 
Q. Gresham had an exact line on them. He regarded them 
as foolish, misguided women. 

From what I actually saw, and from letters and per- 
sonal recollections of the time, General Gresham was with 
but few exceptions on good terms with every man, woman, 
and child in Natchez. It was his opportunity to show his 
love for the human race, the high as well as the low. His 
most intimate friend, perhaps, at Natchez was Judge Josiah 
Winchester, an ex-member of the Mississippi Supreme 
Court and an opponent of secession in the 1861 convention. 
Born in 1809 in Salem, Massachusetts, a graduate of Dart- 
mouth, a student of law two years in the office of RufuS 
Choate, Josiah Winchester emigrated to Natchez in the 
early '30's and there enjoyed a large and lucrative practice 
until, on the stump and platform, beginning at the time of 
the Lincoln and Douglas Debate, he took up the cudgels 
against secession.^ He married into the same family — the 
Howells — from which Jefferson Davis took his second wife, 
and the women of his family were all in sympathy with 
secession. Judge Winchester dined with us. Afterwards 
one of his daughters said, "I did not approve of my father 
dining with a Yankee general." In views and sympathies 
Judge Winchester and General Gresham were in thorough 
accord — the one to help keep his people from foolish acts, 

iWith prophetic vision, in his written communication to the papers entitled "An Appeal 
to the Thinking Men of the South," he pointed out that "if the senators and congressmen of 
the South only remained at their posts, they could, with the help of their then party friends, 
hold in checkmate any policies inimical to the interests of the South that Lincoln and his 
Republican supporters might attempt to establish in the South. And on the other hand, by 
seceding from the Union and abandoning the vantage ground that they held in Congress, 
they made it easily possible for the Abolitionists and the extreme men of the North to 
control the situation and to put into practice the very laws which they were most earnest 
to defeat." 

"Secession means war — war, abolition without compensation, and the loss of billions of 
dollars to the Southern people in the shrinkage that would ensue in other values." 

"Hell bent upon secession," as an ex-Confederate put it to me, "the radicals replied with 
anonymous letters, fanatics warned him that to continue his opposition to secession would 
forfeit his life." But he stayed, and on the last roll in the Mississippi Convention of January, 
1 86 1, as a delegate from Adams County, Josiah Winchester is recorded against secession. 



252 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

the other to make it as easy for them as possible to resume 
their loyal relations. 

I heard Judge Winchester and my husband discuss the 
confiscation acts of 1861 and 1862, which became the basis 
for the Emancipation Proclamation. The acts were not 
absolutely inflexible, for they authorized the President to 
extend amnesty and pardon "on such conditions as he may 
deem expedient for the public welfare.'' 

The Confederate government had set the pace by the 
act of May 21, 1861, which sequestrated all debts due 
from citizens of the Confederate States to Northern in- 
dividuals or corporations and commanded their payment 
into the Confederate treasury. The criticism of the law 
writers and publicists, that such laws are not humane 
nor based on justice, does not alter the fact that they 
are within the war powers of all governments. The 
existence of this power set my husband against war as 
one of the means of settling international difficulties, and 
he later used it with effect, as will appear in my story 
about the threatened clash with Great Britain in the 
Cleveland administration. 

Cotton was King, but instead of being an aid, was one 
of the causes of the downfall of the Confederacy. One 
day as I was riding with my husband, I said to him as we 
passed some bales of cotton on the sidewalk, "I want a 
little of that cotton to fill my pincushions." "Not an 
ounce," he said, "can you have of it." Except under cer- 
tain restrictions cotton was contraband. After the Miss- 
issippi River was opened. Union men were permitted by 
our government to sell their own cotton. What a premium 
on perjury! By statute, the Confederate government in 
1 86 1 required all cotton above what was necessary for 
home consumption to be turned over to it. The Southern 
people were interdicted from dealing in what they them- 
selves raised. The theory was that withholding the sale 
of cotton would so embarrass England and France that 



NATCHEZ IN 1863 253 

they would come to the aid of the Confederacy.^ It was 
a mistaken pohcy and did much at the start to demoraHze 
men in sympathy with the Confederacy and men in the 
Confederate army. Not all orders of the Confederate 
government to destroy cotton that would fall into the 
hands of the enemy were obeyed. Some Southern planters 
would conspire with men in the Confederate army to put 
their cotton through the Confederate and Union lines. 
All sorts of bribes were offered Union officers. The govern- 
ment secret service men were at all tim.es alert. But still 
many men made fortunes. One ofificer who was dismissed 
from the army while I was at Natchez boasted as he was 
leaving that he had made $100,000 in the cotton trade 
after the fall of Vicksburg. Dismissal was no punishment 
to him. Another officer, whom General McPherson, at 
my husband's instance, removed from the command at 
Natchez, has a monument in the National Park at Vicks- 
burg. General Grant did everything in his power to 
lessen this evil. From helping a planter get his cotton 
through the lines for a consideration — and there were 
men in both armies who did this — it was not far to 
actual stealing. And there were men in both armies who 
did that. 

One of the brightest men it has been my pleasure to 
meet is James Surget, approaching four-score years, still 
living on "Cherry Grove" plantation, nine miles out of 
Natchez, where he was born and where his grandfather in 
1787 established himself with his slaves — not the finest 
house but the handsomest grounds and trees in all the 
Natchez country. James Surget was another intimate of 
my husband at Natchez. In addition to "Cherr}^ Grove," 
he owned two large plantations across the river in Con- 
cordia Parish, Louisiana, and one thousand slaves when the 

•When it was apparent that New Orleans would fall, the Confederate goverrment burned 
$80,000,000 worth of cotton stored there. Then, May 5, 1862, under authority of an act of the 
Confederate congress. General Beauregard ordered all cotton within five miles of the Mississippi 
River burned. 

17 



254 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

war began. Although he suffered a great loss in world's 
goods, the war did not break him.^ 

In discussing the war, Mr. Surget said to me: 
' ' I voted against secession in 1 86 1 . I know it is contrary 
to the general impression, but the large slaveholder was 
against secession. ^ In the black belt along the Mississippi 
River, where the most of the slaves were, the vote was against 
secession. What the large planters wanted in 1861 was 
cooperation; that is, all the Cotton States threaten to go 
out in a body, but instead of going, accept guaranties or 
compensation rather than fight for our negroes. Never 
was there a man of character an overseer. This was the 
great drawback to the large slaveholders. But we were in 
the hands of the politicians, and for a time I followed them. 
"When the order came May 5, 1862, to burn all the 
cotton within five miles of the river, acting under the di- 
rect orders of the provost marshal of our district, I burned 
1200 bales of my own cotton on the Ashley plantation and 
500 bales of my own cotton on the Waterloo plantation 
in Concordia Parish. I also, under the same order, burned 
500 bales of cotton eight miles below Natchez on the Missis- 
sippi side that belonged to Washington Ford. After the 
war Ford sued me for $200,000 in the Circuit Court of 
Adams County, Mississippi, claiming the act of the Con- 
federate Congress under which the military orders were 
issued for the burning of the cotton was void. I beat 
him before the jury, which was in part made up of 
negroes. The Supreme Court of the United States, Ford 
vs. Surget 97 U. S., held that while the acts of the Con- 
federate Congress were void, the military duress I was 
under was a reality, and Ford had no recourse on me. 

"Before the order came, I had a tip. My uncle, Jacob 
Surget, a Union man living in New York, was the owner 
of the Linwood plantation just below Natchez and within 
five miles of the river. On this plantation my uncle had 

1 "The large slave-holders as a class, uninfluenced by those who used the institution of slav- 
ery as a political weapon, would not have taken measures to break up the Union, because of 
Mr. Lincoln "selection." — Blaine, "Twenty Years of Congress," Vol. 2, p. 75. See pages 6 and 7. 



NATCHEZ IN 1863 255 

627 bales of the crop of 186 1. I promptly hauled it to 
my place at 'Cherry Grove,' nine miles from the river. 
Then the order came to burn all cotton within ten miles 
of the river. I then moved this cotton to Kingston, four- 
teen miles from the river. After your husband was in 
command I hauled this cotton to Natchez preparatory 
to shipping it to my uncle in New York. Of the 627 bales, 
600 were well packed and went forward without delay. 
The 27 were not properly packed for shipment and were 
held for repacking. While I was gone home the cotton 
thieves levied on these 27 bales. The following Monday 
I was back in Natchez and easily located and identified 
the cotton. Your husband gave me a peremptory order 
to the provost-marshal to see that these 27 bales were turned 
over to me. I presented the order to the provost-marshal. 
I was graciously received and given a written acknowledge- 
ment that the cotton was held subject to my order. I went 
to 'Cherry Grove' expecting to return the following Friday 
and ship the 27 bales on the boat scheduled to leave that 
day. Upon my return on Thursday, I learned that the day 
before, Wednesday, General Gresham had suddenly left 
for Vicksburg to join General Sherman on the Meridian 
campaign. I never again saw my uncle's 27 bales of cotton. 
But he realized $300,000 on the 600 bales I shipped him. 
He could have obtained $500,000, but he was holding for 
$600,000 and sold on a declining market." 

Around that mess table at "Rosalie" I learned much. 
One day I heard my husband say, "Babbitt, we are operat- 
ing under the war power so we can let negroes testify before 
the provost-marshal." Under -the law as it then was in 
Mississippi, as in all the other Slave States, a freedman, 
no matter how small the strain — even one-sixteenth — ■ 
could not testify in the Mississippi courts. 

While my husband was in command at Natchez, a 
white man killed a negro, who was the aggressor. In his 
Emancipation Proclamation Mr. Lincoln had enjoined on 
the freedmen to work and to abstain from all violence unless 



256 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

in necessary self-defense. The white man was admitted 
to bail, was advised to retain Judge Winchester, which he 
did, and was discharged on the ground of self-defense, 
although the negroes were called on to testify against him. 

Soon after I reached Natchez, General Alonzo Thomas, 
the adjutant-general of the army, as the personal repre- 
sentative of the Secretary of War, arrived. 

General Thomas's special mission was the enlistment 
of the negroes in the army. It was not General Grant's 
plan. My husband questioned its wisdom and so did 
General Crocker. Their idea was to keep the negroes on 
the plantations. But the men in the field were not in 
control. To Colonel Farrar, who commanded across the 
river at Vidalia, was intrusted the duty of inaugurating 
General Thomas's plan. Farrar was an honest man and 
he had many clashes with General Thomas. General 
Grant sustained Farrar whenever he could. In the Fall of 
1863 Colonel Farrar organized what he called the Sixth 
United States Artillery Colored. He impressed the best 
able-bodied negroes and all the horses and bridles he could 
lay hands on. James Surget is my authority for the state- 
ment that the negro troops — and some of them had been 
his slaves and had witnessed harsh treatment at the hands 
of some of the Confederates — were most considerate to 
the white people. 

The enlistment of the young able-bodied negroes oper- 
ated as General Grant, General Crocker, and my husband 
feared. Those who remained behind were dissatisfied. 
They would not work on the plantations. They flocked 
to the towns, where the soldiers were camped. They were 
called "contrabands." Their presence in and about the 
army was an evil, and as there were not sufficient medical 
officers, disease spread.' There were a great many of them 
in and around Natchez, and they were a source of constant 
anxiety to my husband. Many were kept in an inclosure 
in "Natchez under the Hill." Out of the four hundred 

1 See pages 6 and 7. 



NATCHEZ IN 1863 257 

negroes from James Surget's two plantations in Concordia 
Parish, Louisiana, who came to Natchez after July 4, 1863, 
he had the names of three hundred who had died by 
January i, 1864. Drinking river water, which produced 
dysentery, was one of the prime causes of this great mortal- 
ity. In bondage on the plantations, they had good medical 
attendance and good cistern water to drink. River water 
caused great sickness among the soldiers, and it was fatal 
to the contrabands. The cisterns about "Rosalie" were 
soon empty, and from drinking river water I myself was 
taken ill, and it was deemed best for me to go north. 

Zealous in protecting the people in their homes, Walter 
Q. Gresham was severe in punishing robbery and rapine on 
the part of soldiers.^ 

1 Captain John F. Jenkins, an ex-Confederate and a native of Natchez, writes me the 
following: 

"General Gresham was a strenuous advocate of preserving the rights of non-combatants 
to their personal and real property. He enacted stern measures to repress any violence or 
robberies by the federal soldiery. 

"A notable instance of General Gresham's activity in enforcing the law and order, and 
protecting the property rights of the non-combatants of the vicinity of Natchez, was the 
punishment of some of his soldiers for the robbery of a large amount of silver belonging to the 
estate of Dr. J. C. Jenkins, of which estate Judge Winchester happened to be the executor. 
The young ladies of the family, chaperoned by their governess. Madam Mitchelly, were living 
at 'Elgin,' the family home, about seven miles from the city of Natchez. About lo o'clock p.m. 
some soldiers appeared at the front door and demanded to be admitted on the ground that 
they were ordered by their officers to search for arms. They were, of course, admitted, and as 
soon as they entered, the inmates of the house were all collected in one room and put under 
guard while the remaining soldiers ransacked the house, taking from the safes and closets about 
1 1,000 in silverware. Among this silver were the drinking cups and spoons and knives and 
forks owned by Surgeon John F. Carmichael, who was a Revolutionary War veteran, and his 
commission signed by George Washington himself and countersigned by General Knox, the 
Secretary of War, was hanging on the wall of the room whence his silver was pilfered. The 
robbers, having secured their booty, retired without further molestation of the inmates. Early 
next day the ladies repaired to Natchez and informed Judge Winchester of the robbery. He 
accompanied them at once to the headquarters of General Gresham, who heard their story 
and then immediately set in motion all his secret service men. In three or four days the men 
were spotted, duly identified, and lodged in jail. In a very few days after, a court martial 
was organized, with many distinguished officers in charge. The court martial resulted in the 
conviction of the thieves, two of whom were sentenced to hard labor in the penitentiary for 
twenty years and one for ten years. 

"This act of justice, and many others besides, endeared General Gresham to the hearts 
of the citizens of Natchez, and they grieved indeed when the vicissitudes of war removed him 
to another field of action. 

"It is of interest that the cup of Surgeon Carmichael, as well as about twenty pieces of 
silver formerly belonging to the Revolutionary War veteran, were discovered some months 
afterwards in the possession of a colored woman. They were readily secured, and the cup 
still is held as a much prized relic of the Revolutionary War, as well as of the robbery of 'Elgin 
and the Civil War of 1863." 



258 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

While I was at Natchez reconstruction in Mississippi 
was begun. And while General Thomas's mission concerned 
the status of the negro, the record is that he soon reported 
to the Secretary of War, "that in the opinion of General 
Crocker and General Gresham the time for reconstruction 
in Mississippi had come." 

But it was not the kind that came later — that of Thad- 
deus Stevens and Charles Sumner. It was that of Presi- 
dent Lincoln, General Grant, General Crocker, and General 
Gresham. 

Before the war Adams County, including Natchez, was 
a Whig community. It sent a sohd Union delegation to 
the Secession Convention. After the ordinance of seces- 
sion was declared adopted and a referendum was denied, 
all the active young men, including those who had opposed 
secession, went into the Confederate army, and they were 
the longest to stay there. But some of the far-seeing men 
of means, while giving the semblance of their allegiance to 
the Confederacy, hedged against its failure by transferring 
their bank accounts from New Orleans to Liverpool and 
Paris. 

It was not long — December 8, 1863 — until Mr. Lincoln's 
Proclamation of Amnesty and Pardon came. It was most 
generous. It exempted only the highest civil and military 
officers of the Confederacy from its operation, but he 
assured these as complete pardon as was within his con- 
stitutional power if they would only return to their alle- 
giance. 

My husband interpreted this proclamation that no 
duress should be used in inducing men qualified to accept 
its terms. The published records of the War Department 
show that he ordered Colonel Farrar not to impress men 
in Louisiana into the United States army against their will. 
To Frank Surget he said, "The time will come, and it is 
not far distant, I beheve, when you can take the oath of 
allegiance without running any risk of having your property 



NATCHEZ IN 18G3 259 

outside of our lines destroyed by the other side. Until 
then, continue as you are, and come and dine with me 
this evening." 

At that time Mr. Surget had 500 bales of cotton at 
Woodville under the control of the Confederates, which 
would have been promptly destroyed, he said, if he took 
the oath. The richest man in Adams County, and one of 
the wealthiest in the South when the war began, the fact 
that he was forced to render it some aid at the start and 
finesse as long as part of his property was outside of the 
Union lines, may account for the belief that he was one of 
the ultra-secessionists. Neither is his loyalty to the Con- 
federacy established by the fact that he afterwards told 
General Brayman, one of the political generals, "There 
are two things you can't do — you can't make me take the 
oath of allegiance and you can't break me." Most of Mr. 
Surget 's cash was then in Liverpool and Paris. Man of 
intellect that he was, he knew he could get justice in the 
end. James Surget wanted to take the oath of allegiance 
in the Spring of 1864, but General Brayman would not 
allow him to do so until Mr. Surget threatened he would 
apply to General McPherson at Vicksburg and, if refused 
then, would appeal to President Lincoln. In other words, 
General Brayman would be paid for doing what it was his 
plain duty to do. 

Before the advent of the "carpet-bagger," the robbery 
of the Southern people began. As General Grant had left 
it, there were handsome lace curtains in the Wilson parlors, 
the executive offices. A woman who traveled with Adju- 
tant-General Thomas called on me. She said, "Why 
don't you crush these curtains?" "What do you mean?" 
I asked her. "Take them and ship them home." Her 
exit was precipitate. I went to my husband and told him 
the story. He said, "Tell Mrs. Wilson to remove her cur- 
tains at once. I may be ordered from here any day." 
This she did, and they were never in sight again until after 



26o LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

the close of the war. And there were other robbers than the 
Yankee soldiers. The "tax in kind"' was not always levied 
with a considerate, a delicate or an honest hand. There were 
Confederate officers who were said to have been "better 
tax collectors than fighters." Confederate currency soon 
became valueless. So most of all that was raised was 
levied on or taken by the Confederate government. 

One day John W. Redding, a ten-year-old boy, unac- 
companied, bolted into headquarters almost out of breath 
exclaiming, "General, the Yankees have taken all our 
saddles and bridles and I can't ride my pony." This was 
at the time Colonel Farrar was organizing his negro regi- 
ment of artillery and impressing negroes, horses, and bridles 
without regard to private rights. An orderly was sent for 
a saddle and bridle, and the boy went home happy. An- 
other schoolboy, thirteen years of age, George W. Koontz, 
fared even worse, for Colonel Farrar had not only taken his 
saddle and bridle but his pony also. A call at headquarters 
restored to him his pony and equipment. 

Henry Vaughn of Kingston, Adams County, years after- 
wards told me this story: "When only fifteen, I ran off 
and enlisted in the Confederate army. After a time, on 
account of my youth, my guardian secured my discharge. 
Upon reaching home I was told that my favorite filly, 
'Puss,' had been stolen by some contraband negroes. 
I announced to my mother and my guardian my intention 
of going to Natchez in search of 'Puss.' Their opposition 
was so great that I stole off and rode a mule into Natchez — 
the pickets passed me through when I said I was going for 
a doctor. I hunted through the livery stables and all 
over the town for 'Puss' until finally I halted on Orleans 
Street, opposite ' Rosalie ' and General Gresham's head- 
quarters. While I was standing there an officer rode up 
on 'Puss,' dismounted, gave 'Puss's' rein to an orderly, and 
went into headquarters. After a time I entered the lawn, 
giving ' Puss' a caress as I passed. Then I went into General 

1 The "tax in kind" was one-tenth of all that was raised. 



NATCHEZ IN 1863 261 

Gresham's office and told him ' Puss ' was my animal and I 
would like to have her. The officer who had ridden her up 
admitted he had bought her from a negro. 'Young man, 
I don't doubt your statement, but it is not sufficient for 
me to act on,' said General Gresham to me. My answer 
was, 'Turn "Puss" loose on the lawn without saddle or bri- 
dle, arid if I can't satisfy you she is mine, I will release all 
claims to her.' At first she went to picking. From behind 
a bush I called her, 'Puss, Puss.' She pricked up her ears, 
whinnied, and came to me. ' Down on your knees, " Puss." ' 
Down she went. 'She is your animal,' said General Gres- 
ham, and in addition he gave me a pass through his lines." 
Guards were furnished to many families, especially on 
the outskirts of the city. Mrs. Nancy W. Winston and 
her granddaughter, a miss of fifteen, Nannie W. Thornhill, 
lived at the head of Washington Street. With them were 
Mrs. Anne E. Stanton, the mother of "Tip," a gallant 
Confederate soldier. "Our men were all in the Confederate 
army," said Miss Thornhill, in telling the story. "We had 
been furnished a guard at night of two soldiers. One was 
an old man, the other a young soldier of twenty-tw-o. Early 
evenings until bedtime they played cards and had music 
with us and then stood guard until sunrise, when they 
returned to camp. One day the household was thrown into 
consternation. The guards must leave with their regi- 
ment to go to Vicksburg. Grandmother did not know 
what to do, but on my insistence concluded to call on 
General Gresham, whom we had never met. The general 
readily agreed to leave us one guard but said it must be 
the old man. The reason he gave w^as that the young 
man was the better soldier and could stand the marching 
which was in store for them, where the old man might 
break down. 'But,' I said, 'we don't want the old man, 
we want the young man; the old man is stupid.' Finally 
the general agreed that we could draw straws as to which 
should go and which should stay. I was to superintend 



262 LIFE OF WALTER Q TJ I N T I N GRESHAM 

the drawing. I did so and we got the younger soldier." 
Miss Thornhill became the wife of Lieutenant W. P. Gallon, 
of the Fourth Illinois Cavalry, then on General Hatch's 
staff and subsequently a leading member of the bar of 
central Illinois. Mrs. Gallon's husband died and she re- 
turned to her native city. Though eligible and of the 
bluest Southern blood, she is not one of the "Daughters." 

After the Meridian campaign there was no work for 
real soldiers at Natchez. My husband followed General 
Sherman. The political generals who were left behind 
were subjected to all sorts of annoyances. Many people 
took the oath of allegiance, not intending to keep it, and 
did not do so. Sentinels were waylaid and shot down, and 
similar petty acts committed. But none of these acts 
justified the measures to which the authorities resorted. 
The testimony of the citizens of Natchez is, and in this 
they are corroborated by Golonel Farrar, that General 
Brayman not only was corrupt in money matters but made 
war on women.* 

The following is an incident which illustrated some of 
the feminine traits — what the poHtical generals would have 
considered an insult — that did not disturb the equanimity 
of General Gresham. 

The Protestant Orphans' Home of Natchez was founded 
in 1816 and was made a State institution in 182 1. It was 
controlled by a Board of Trustees composed of ladies of 
Natchez. It felt the ravages of war, and the time came 
when there was nothing with which to feed the orphans. 
The chairman of the board was appointed a committee to 
call on General Gresham and get the necessary rations to 
keep the orphans from starving. At "Rosalie" she ad- 
dressed an orderly at the foot of the gallery, ' ' I want to see 
General Gresham." "Walk in. Madam, and turn to the 
left." Looking up at the American flag that hung from the 
upper gallery, she said : ' ' The orphans can starve before I 
will step under that flag. I would not go under it to get 

1 See page 249. 



NATCHEZ IN 1863 263 

bread for my own children." (I am giving the woman's 
own account.) She wanted the orderly to ask the General 
to come out. This he refused to do. Finally she resorted 
to strategy. "Tell the General there is a lady outside who 
cannot ascend the gallery steps but who is very anxious to 
see him." Promptly the General appeared. "General," 
she said, "I am a Rebel. I am the president of the board 
of trustees of the Protestant Orphans' Home and I have 
been sent to request you to issue rations to keep the little 
ones from starving. But to save them from that fate, as 
well as the members of my own family if that be neces- 
sary, I would not step under your flag." According to her 
story, told years afterwards, this was the answer of the 
General: "I admire your frankness, but your sentiments 
will not cause us to allow your orphans to starve, and I will 
issue orders for all the necessary rations." Resuming her 
narration, this woman — or lady, for she was refined and 
cultured and a great church worker — said: "We got the 
rations, and didn't I bring that Yankee general down!" 
Southern women of good Confederate extraction acted thus. 
But the littleness of the sex is not plead in palliation of the 
corruption and wantonness of the political generals. 

Another most accompHshed woman, whose sympathies 
were with the Union but whose husband was in the Con- 
federate army, told me how her younger sister did every- 
thing she could within the bounds of polite society to arouse 
my husband's Yankee sentiments. Never could she get 
a "rise" out of him. The former's claim against the govern- 
ment for property taken by the United States forces was, 
on my husband's statement, allowed. 

Just one more incident. On the staff of the Confederate 
or Mihtary Governor of Louisiana was Colonel Lemuel P. 
Conner, a citizen of Natchez. In December, 1863, camp 
measles extended to the children of Colonel Conner's 
family. Two of them had died and the others were very 
dangerously ill. January 10, 1864, Colonel Conner applied 



264 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

to Brigadier General Gresham for permission to visit the 
remaining members of his family and for a safe conduct in 
and out of Natchez. It was promptly granted. March 27, 
1 916, Lemuel P. Conner, one of the sick children who sur- 
vived, wrote me: 

"Your husband granted the permission asked because 
he was a man before a soldier .... and showed to a 
suffering mortal the broad humanity which earned for him 
the respect, the esteem, and even the affection of our people 
here over whom for a time he was virtually the ruler. 

"Away off yonder in the future when my descendants 
are reading the history of our country, of the terrible frat- 
ricidal strife in the sixties, and there shall come up the name 
of Walter Q. Gresham, they will recall it as the name of 
the man who was kind to their ancestor; for I am handing 
the story on down with directions to carry it to further 
generations; thus paying my small tribute of appreciation." 

When I went north early in November, river travel was 
so hazardous that my husband sent me to Memphis in a 
"tin clad." Furthermore, he sent in my care an accom- 
plished Southern woman who had made herself very offen- 
sive to the Federal authorities at Natchez by acting as a 
Rebel spy. General Crocker would not give her a safe 
conduct, and without this she was afraid to start north. 
General Crocker had been ordered away and W. Q. Gresham 
was in supreme command. The madame had had enough 
of war and wanted to get back to relatives in Missouri. 
We parted friends at Cairo. 



CHAPTER XVII 
MINOR CAMPAIGNS— RE-ENLISTMENTS 



HARMFUL PROLONGATION OF THE WAR AMERICA'S OB- 
LIGATION TO OTHER LANDS UNION REVERSE AT CHICKA- 

MAUGA MERIDIAN EXPEDITION LED BY GENERAL SHERMAN 

WARFARE IN MISSISSIPPI AND LOUISIANA CONFEDERATES 

THREATEN NATCHEZ GENERAL GRESHAM COMMANDS EXPE- 
DITION AGAINST FORT ADAMS DANGERS OF MISSISSIPPI 

RIVER TRAVEL THE MERIDIAN EXPEDITION THIRTEENTH 

AMENDMENT RATIFIED BY SENATE, BUT OPPOSED IN THE 
HOUSE RE-ENLISTMENT OF VETERANS. 

AFTER the fall of Vicksburg, the Confederate defeat 
^ at Gettysburg, and the annihilation of the Morgan 
Raiders, Mr. Lincoln's overtures, which still held good, 
should have been accepted. "Had Alexander H. Stephens 
instead of Jefferson Davis been President of the Con- 
federacy," James Surget said to me in 1914, "the war 
would have ended in the Summer of 1863, and we would 
have received something for our slaves." All along Mr. 
Lincoln had argued it would be cheaper to pay a reasonable 
amount for the slaves than to wage war for another year. 
The bitterness that he had manifested in 1858 had dis- 
appeared from his heart long before 1863. 

The abihty of the Confederate soldier, sustained and 
encouraged as he was by the women, to stay on the firing 
line to the last, cannot be pleaded in palHation of the 
Southern leadership — that of a single man. Military 
genius that he was, and no man could have done better 
with the crumbhng Confederacy, Jefferson Davis was no 
statesman. He did not consider the position of his peo- 
ple. Vicksburg and Gettysburg, especially Vicksburg — for 

265 



266 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

beyond cavil it revealed Grant's genius — demonstrated 
what Jefferson Davis himself had predicted, that the South 
could not win if it came to a final test of arms. 

The other parties to the contest, over-seas, Russia on 
the one hand and England and France on the other, saw 
the handwriting on the wall. From the beginning Russia 
had been the friend of the United States. Now she was 
to come out in the open. 

Think not that anything escaped the men, the bright- 
est and most alert I ever met, who assembled around that 
mess table at "Rosalie," while I was there in September, 
October, and early November, 1863. 

One morning at breakfast Cyrus Hall, as Colonel Hall 
was universally called, said: "England and France will 
now desert the Confederacy, for Russia with her men, her 
guns, and ships, has come out for the Union.'' "That is 
what this Russian fleet means in New York harbor," said 
Colonel Kent, another Illinois man. Colonel Bryant, of the 
Twelfth Wisconsin, said, "The Czar has freed his serfs and 
he is going to help us free the negroes; with him on our 
side, we can whip the Confederacy, England, and France 
combined." My husband voiced his heart's desire for 
peace : ' ' Surely the men in Richmond will not longer press 
the contest." And then he said what he had said and 
written over and over, "The Southern people want the 
war to end." It subsequently developed (as well as any- 
thing is established without the official reports) that the 
sealed orders of the two Russian fleets — the one that first 
appeared in New York, the other in San Francisco harbor — 
required their respective admirals to report to the President 
of the United States if, on their arrival in American waters, 
they found the United States at war with England, or with 
England and France combined. 

Later, in Washington, as a member of President Arthur's 
cabinet and Secretary of State under President Cleveland, 
it was my husband's pleasure to acknowledge the obliga- 



MINOR WARFARE — R E - E N L I S T M E N T S 267 

tions of the United States to Russia for the aid Russia had 
rendered us during the Civil War. With Baron De Struve 
and Madam De Struve in President Arthur's time, and 
Prince Cantacuzene, the Russian Ambassador in Cleveland's 
second administration, our relations were more than cordial. 
The Baron and Madam De Struve were the best posted 
diplomats I ever met. 

Going back to 1863, — of passing events, Jefferson Davis 
was the best informed of men. But he did not take his own 
people into his confidence. Bitterness then, as ever after- 
wards, seemed to be in the Confederate chieftain's heart. ^ 
I lived in constant dread of the suffering that might and did 
come to me, and toward the man who could but did 
not end the carnage after the civilized world and many of 
his faithful, gallant followers recognized the hopelessness of 
the contest, 2 I may be pardoned for cherishing some resent- 
ment. The acceptance of the generous terms Mr. Lincoln 
held out to the last involved no humiliation to the people 
who had helped make and whose destiny was bound up 
in the Union. 

War in 1863, with the United States backed by Russia, 
would have swept the English commerce from the seas. 
Raising the blockade as the Laird Brothers' rams might 
have done, would not have stopped but would have accele- 
rated the march of Sherman's armies to the sea. 

As my husband had predicted, the invasion of Penn- 
sylvania by Lee, and of Indiana and Ohio by "Morgan's 

1 In the Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, Vol. i, page 2, Mr. Davis writes: "The English- 
man's sense of fair play and the manly instincts which predisposes him to side with the weak, 
gave us hosts of friends, but all their good intentions were paralyzed or foiled by their wily 
minister of foreign affairs, Lord John Russell, and his coadjutor on this side, the artful, unscru- 
pulous United States Secretary of State, William H. Seward." 

2 From the ranks of the Confederate army the cry went up, "We cannot win." The 
Irish Confederate General, Patrick R. Cleburne, who had received his military education in the 
English army, and his wit and generous sentiments along with his race, in an elaborate argu- 
ment or memorial put it up to Jefferson Davis as Commander-in-Chief, that the only hope for 
the Confederacy was to free and arm the slaves. "So long as we cling to slavery, not even 
England or all Europe," argued General Cleburne, "can acknowledge our independence." 
General Lee, I was informed by Colonel Berkley of ore of the Virginia regiments, verbally 
advised Mr. Davis to enroll and save the negro. When too late to do any good, the Confed- 
erate government attempted to carry out the plan. 



268 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

horse thieves'' — I use the expression as one of the times, not 
by way of reflection — proved a good thing for the Union 
cause.' Although Morgan often left better horses than he 
took, my father never was as strong a Secessionist or Rebel 
— for he never minced words — after that daring raid. One 
thorough-blooded Kentucky mare my father bought at the 
sale in Corydon of the broken-down Morgan stock soon 
recovered her "bottom," and at the Harrison County Fair 
in September, 1864, in the free-for-all, outdistanced all 
comers. She was named "Lady Morgan," and after years 
of service was given an honorable burial. 

It was while I was at Natchez that General Grant went 
north, only stopping at "Natchez under the Hill" for a 
few minutes as the boat landed for fuel. He and many of 
his soldiers were drawn east by the Union reverse at Chicka- 
mauga. News of that battle, which was fought on Sept- 
ember 19 and 20, 1863, came to us by newspaper and 
by the "grapevine." Then came a letter from Daniel G. 
Griffin, commanding the Thirty-eighth Indiana Volunteers. 
This letter was read at the breakfast table, and every word 
was carefully scanned. Colonel Griffin conceded that the 
enemy had the best of it. "But 'twas to them a dear 
bought victory." The Thirty-eighth was in both days' 
battle, right at the front, under General Thomas, "the Rock 
of Chickamauga." Early the first day General Rosecrans 
fled from the field. On the night of the 19th the Thirty- 
eighth threw up some breastworks that helped protect 
them on the 20th. "Still, out of 330 men we lost no. 
Major Carter was badly wounded, but will recover. ' ' There 
was a long list of the killed and wounded. The survivors 
retreated in good order under General Thomas to Chatta- 
nooga. "Colonel Scribner (the original colonel), not yet 
promoted, although General Thomas had recommended it, 
commanded the brigade. Thomas is the beau ideal of the 
Army of the Cumberland. General Grant and General 
Sherman are here. We are sure to end this war soon. We 

iSee pages 223-5. 



MINOR WARFARE — R E - E N L I S T M E N T S 269 

expect to see you here before long." There were con- 
gratulations on winning the star, and sly digs at Captain 
Babbitt's convivial habits. The captain also had a letter 
from "Little Dan." I shall always remember one of 
Babbitt's remarks: "I never could understand how Dan 
Griffin, small in stature, who never uttered an oath and 
never took a drink of whiskey, had such marvelous com- 
mand over the largest and roughest of men." 

The fears of as strong a man as Frank Surget, that if 
he took the oath of allegiance his property outside of the 
Union lines would be destroyed, explain why my husband 
had military duties to perform while he remained at Natchez, 
and also, with all due deference to my Southern friends, 
make it plain that the war was not prosecuted from the 
Southern side with that consideration for the rights of 
noncombatants that they would have the historian always 
believe. 

In addition to the Confederate troops — General Joe 
Johnston's in Mississippi, — who were outside of Vicksburg 
when it surrendered in the Summer and early Fall of 1863, 
the Confederate government raised in Mississippi alone 
some 7,000 troops and united them to Johnston's army. 
General Taylor, the son of President Taylor, was the Con- 
federate commander in the Trans-Mississippi department. 
The seat of the Louisiana Confederate government under 
Governor Moore was in the saddle in northern and north- 
western Louisiana. Colonel Harrison was the active man 
in that region. Wirt Adams, who had been promoted to a 
brigadier-generalcy, September 18, 1863, and who had com- 
manded a regiment of cavalry up to that time, decHning 
an office in Mr. Davis's cabinet when the Provisional Con- 
federate Government was organized at Montgomery, com- 
manded the Confederate forces in southern Mississippi. 
Meridian and "the railroads running thence south and east 
were the source of supphes for the Confederate army, 
except beef, and that came from Texas. Adams would 
18 



270 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

threaten Natchez and other points on the river and then at 
some unguarded point pass arms and ammunition to Harri- 
son on the west side and receive cattle in return. At one 
time Colonel Farrar captured 1,200 Texas cattle which were 
just on the point of being driven into- the river to swim to 
the eastern side. They were all turned over to the United 
States commissary for the Union soldiers. 

August 28, 1863, from Vicksburg General Grant wrote 
to General Crocker at Natchez, "I want that expedition 
against Harrisonburg to start as soon as possible." Harri- 
sonburg was the county seat of Catahoula Parish, Louisiana, 
thirty-five miles northwest of Natchez on the Black River. 
In it was Fort Beauregard, which mounted some heavy 
guns. The expedition marched by way of Trinity on the 
Tensas River. It consisted of two brigades, one composed 
of four Illinois regiments, the Fourteenth, Fifteenth, Forty- 
sixth and Seventy-sixth, and Captain Powell's battery of 
the Second Illinois Artillery. This brigade was commanded 
by Colonel Cyrus Hall of the Sixteenth Illinois. The other 
brigade was commanded by General Gresham. It con- 
sisted of the Twelfth Wisconsin, Colonel George E. Bryant; 
the Fifty-third Indiana, Lieutenant-Colonel William Jones; 
the Twenty-eighth Illinois, Lieutenant- Colonel Richard 
Ritter; the Thirty-second Illinois, Major George H. English; 
and Spears' Fifteenth Ohio Battery, commanded by Lieu- 
tenant Burdick. Then there was the Seventeenth Illinois 
Infantry, mounted as cavalry. 

There was much marching and skirmishing, and each 
side greatly overestimated the numbers of the other. On 
the nights of the 3d and 4th of September, Lieutenant- 
Colonel George W. Logan, in command of Fort Beauregard, 
sent off all the movable stores and supplies, spiked the 
guns, and set fire to and abandoned the fort. He did this 
because his scouts reported that Colonel Horace Randall 
could not reinforce him and he alone could not withstand a 
siege by Crocker's forces, which he estimated at 12,000 men. 



MINOR WARFARE — R E - E N L I S T M E N T S 271 

This expedition was returning on the 6th of September 
as I arrived at Natchez. The next morning I was called 
to the upper gallery of "RosaHe" to witness a skirmish at 
VidaHa on the opposite side of the river, where Colonel 
Farrar was in command with only forty men and some 
negro troops. The negroes were not then reHed on as 
soldiers, as they afterwards fully proved themselves to be. 
General Crocker had left his pontoon train to follow his 
command in from Trinity. A party of Confederate cav- 
alry pursued it and charged into Vidaha as it reached the 
town, shooting and sabering right and left. Colonel Farrar, 
with his forty men, met them with a counter charge, and 
troops rushed across on the ferry, speedily captured some 
men, and driving off the balance pursued them into the 
swamps. It was thus that I saw some actual fighting 
during the war. 

While at Natchez General Crocker at one period had 
12,000 men under him. One day I saw General Gresham 
review 5,000 troops. After Generals Grant and Sherman 
went to Chattanooga and Knoxville the number of Federal 
troops in Mississippi was greatly reduced. General J. B. 
McPherson, who then commanded the Seventeenth Army 
Corps, was left in supreme command, with headquarters 
at Vicksburg. Natchez was attached to the Vicksburg dis- 
trict and General Crocker moved to Hebron, Mississippi. 
My husband was one of the men General McPherson relied 
on in Mississippi. They had an excellent spy organization. 
I have a letter General McPherson wrote my husband in 
which he said : ' ' Send your secret service men out to Pearl 
River and to Jackson. I have the money to pay them." 
McPherson was then at Vicksburg and nearer to Jackson 
by sixty miles than my husband at Natchez. General 
Gresham was able to report the location of most of the 
commands of General Johnston's army, as for instance, 
Loring's division atCanton, General Jackson'sbrigadeat Jack- 
son, Johnston himself at Meridian; also of the individual 



272 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

members of General Breckenridge's staff and escort who 
had enHsted from Adams County and were home in the 
Summer and Fall of 1863, recruiting. Years after the war, 
when I showed Lieutenant A. R. ("Tip") Stanton some 
of the memoranda my husband had collected, he said: 
"He had us located to a man." Furthermore he possessed 
accurate information as to who was supplying the Con- 
federates with information from within our lines. 

A few extracts from the numerous letters that came to 
me at this time will support my assertions and throw much 
light on conditions on the Mississippi between Memphis 
and Vicksburg and Natchez, and in Mississippi: 

Natchez, Miss., 
November 18, 1863 

I have just received your letters written at Memphis, Cairo, 
and Louisville, and I assure you the intelligence that you ar- 
rived safe and found the children well has relieved me very much. 
I was getting very uneasy. I am sorry that mother is sick. I 
know that you will see that she does not suffer. 

I was embarking my brigade on boats for Vicksburg Friday, 
when the Rebels commenced demonstrating in our rear and my 
orders were countermanded. Our pickets were driven in with a 
loss of five and seven wounded. I think we will leave here soon, 
so I may not see you this winter. It would not do for me to 
leave my command when there are prospects of work ahead. 

Vicksburg, Miss., 
November 25, 1863 

We left Natchez Sunday and arrived here Monday evening. 
The navigation of the river above Natchez is attended with more 
peril than when you were down with us. The "Welcome" was 
fired into at Water Proof on Saturday and badly riddled. She 
was struck over 120 times with minie balls and two shells exploded 
in her cabin. Fortunately, no one was hurt. 

Mrs. Crocker and A'Irs. Lanstrance were aboard with their 
children. Water Proof is thirty miles above Natchez on the 
Louisiana side. As I came up Sunday I disembarked the Fifty- 



MINOR WARFARE — RE-ENLISTMENTS 273 

third eighteen miles below Water Proof by the river and saw 
Morgan land below. We went vip on the run, hoping to gobble 
the rebel force, but we were not fleet enough. We captured nine 
men and seventy odd wheels and horses, and gave the party a 
good chase. They had three cannon and would have fired on us 
and destroyed many lives if I had not marched across the land 
and driven them off before the boats arrived. 

Colonel Johnson takes command of the port of Natchez with 
his regiment, the Twenty-eighth Illinois, which is detached from 
my command, the Thirtieth Missouri, and two negro regiments. 
The Twenty-third Indiana is at Big Black, and while it is not fully 
determined that I am to take that regiment in place of the Twenty- 
eighth, I do not think there is much doubt of it. General McPher- 
son ^ays I can have it if I want it. It would suit the Fifty-third 
and the Twenty-third very well to be together, and then I would 
like to get an Indiana regiment when opportunity offers. 

I tried to slip off at Natchez but failed, and was besieged by 
men and women to stay. Mrs. Marshall cried at my going. Gen- 
eral Crocker is here. General Smith is still at Natchez with his 
brigade, but he will soon come up. One of his colonels, Brown of 
the Third Iowa, has preferred charges against him. I think he 
will go the way of many other generals, on the shelf. You formed 
a very correct opinion of him at first sight. I think you are a very 
good judge of character. 

I received your letter of the nth inst. the day I left Natchez. 
Mr. Lownes of the "Benton" handed it to me. He says that 
Captain Grant of the "New National" told him that you capti- 
vated every one on the boat going up to Cairo. I am always 
pleased to hear you are making friends. 

Cannot say how long we will remain here, but think we will 
move out to Big Black soon. General McPherson says he thinks 
he will send me on an expedition to Louisiana that will require 
ten days and require some fighting. I will know the day after 
to-morrow. We will likely remain here or at Big Black imtil 
spring. 

VicKSBURG, Miss., 
December 4, 1863 

I am now embarking with 700 cavalry and two regiments of 
infantry for a raid. I also have one section of artillery. I will 



274 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

disembark at Rodney, strike out through the country, and come 
in at Fort Adams or Natchez; then I will cross the river and go 
up on the Louisiana side. I may have warm work. I will write 
again on my return. 

Previous to the writing of this letter Confederate sym- 
pathizers, scouts, or spies had conveyed the information to 
the Confederate headquarters at Jackson that the garrison 
at Natchez, aside from the negroes, w^as down to only 800 
troops. Up to that time the negro troops had not been 
tested. The night this letter was written a Union spy 
walked into General McPherson's headquarters in Vicks- 
burg with the intelligence that General Wirt Adams with 
a strong column of cavalry and artillery was moving on 
Natchez. Had Adams succeeded in capturing Natchez, a 
Southern gentleman said to me afterwards, Fort Pillow 
would probably have been anticipated. There were then in 
Natchez 1,200 negro troops. But Captain Allen T. Bowie, 
General Adams's adjutant-general, a citizen of Natchez, 
and a most accomplished gentleman, who served his cause 
loyally from the first shot at Sumter until the surrender, 
tells me the Southern gentleman was mistaken about Fort 
Pillow being anticipated had Natchez been taken; that he 
understood Adams's instructions were to divert the enemy's 
attention from Greenville, Mississippi, at which point it 
had been planned to cross the river with ammunition for 
the Trans-Mississippi army; that it never was the inten- 
tion to attack Natchez but to go to Ellis Cliffs, a high point 
seventeen miles below Natchez overlooking the Mississippi, 
and fire on passing boats. Adams County, of which Natchez 
was the county seat, was the home of many in Adams's 
command. "Still," said Captain Bowie, "I didn't actually 
know what were my general's orders or his ultimate plans." 

At 11:15 p. M. of the day the last letter I have quoted 
was written to me, General McPherson issued this written 
order to Lieutenant-Colonel Currie, commanding the Ma- 
rine Brigade: 



MINOR WARFARE — R E - E N L I S T M E N T S 275 

You will proceed immediately on the expedition in command 
of Brigadier-General Gresham, nor will you delay the departure 
of his troops one moment. Take your orders from General Gres- 
ham. Let no delay on your part defeat the object of the expe- 
dition. 

At 3 A.M. of the 5th, the Gresham expedition, with Fort 
Adams as its objective, was off. Stopping at Rodney for 
information, it was in Natchez by noon, a full half-day 
before Adams could reach there. Soon Adams had knowl- 
edge of the reinforcements going to Natchez. 

The smoke of the steamboats. Captain Bowie said, was 
the first information the scouts brought. "Had General 
Adams really intended to take Natchez we could have 
been there before the reinforcements could have arrived, 
for we proceeded with a wagon train and by easy marches." 
Marching into Fayette County the Adams column camped 
the first night at "Travelers Rest" plantation, eleven miles 
southeast of Washington, the early capital of Mississippi 
lying six miles east of Natchez. The next morning Gener- 
al Adams went into Washington. Failing to come on and 
attack Natchez, General Gresham said that he "started after 
Adams." Sending the Marine Brigade, as it was called, 
northeast on the Pine Ridge Road, he took the Washington 
Road, due east out of Natchez, with the infantry, artillery, 
and cavalry. Near Washington he met Colonel Farrar, 
who had come over from Vidalia with his 300 cavalry and 
was scouting after Adams. Learning from Farrar that 
Adams with his whole command had passed through Wash- 
ington, going south for ElHs Cliffs, seventeen miles south 
of Natchez on the Mississippi, presumably to fire on passing 
steamboats. Colonel Farrar was placed in command of all 
the cavalry and started in pursuit. 

Taking the road that leads from Washington to the 
Lower Kingston Road, thence down the Kingston Road 
past Hedges, at 8 p.m. the Union column went into camp 
between the "Cherry Grove" plantation on the Kingston 



276 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

Road and the "Beaux Pres" plantation on the Egypt Road. 
At Hedges, as he passed, Adams had burned the gin of 
A. S. Merrill of "Elmscourt," as a warning to Mr. Merrill 
that he should return to his allegiance. Adams was also 
said to have ordered Colonel J. S. Binghaman's plantation 
and "Richmond," the home of Levin R. Marshall, burned, 
but the details he sent for that purpose were driven off; as 
to this, however. Captain Bowie tells me my husband was 
wrongfully informed, and that there never was any purpose 
on General Adams's part to burn either Colonel Bingha- 
man's place or "Richmond." 

James Surget, the owner of "Linwood," was not then at 
home, while Robert Young, the owner of "Beaux Pres," 
was in the Confederate army. At 9 p. m. Colonel Farrar 
and his cavalry reached Beverly, where the Kingston and 
Ellis ClifTs Road crosses the Natchez and Woodville Road 
at right angles. Adams reached Ellis Cliffs with part of 
his command but did not tarry to fire at any passing steam- 
boats. He marched thence with the major part of his 
command northwest three miles to "Laurel Hill" planta- 
tion on the Woodville Road and two miles north of Beverly. 
The road between Ellis Cliffs and "Laurel Hill," winding 
through very narrow cuts and with almost perpendicular 
ascents, was no place for artillery. Said Sergeant Lindsay 
in 1 916, "We kept the artillery on the road between Beverly 
and Elhs Cliffs, where it could readily move east." 

The mansion at "Laurel Hill," built in Spanish days, on 
one of the most beautiful sites in the Mississippi valley, is 
still standing in a good state of preservation. It belonged 
to Doctor Mercer, a gentleman who visited my husband at 
"Rosalie," and in December, 1863, was occupied by WilHam 
Shields, heutenant-commander in the United States Navy, 
retired. "Captain Shields gave us an elegant dinner," 
said Captain Bowie, "for which I gave him an order, that 
it might appear, should General Gresham come along, that 
it was not voluntary." 



MINOR WARFARE — RE-ENLISTMENTS 277 

At midnight General Gresham learned of the positions 
of Farrar and Adams. Could Farrar hold Beverly, Adams's 
retreat to the south or east was cut off. Sending Farrar 
word to hold the crossroads if possible, at 3 a. m. the Gres- 
ham column was on the march, and although, as he wrote 
me, "I marched my men unmercifully, I was unable to 
make the crossroads at Beverly before Adams forced Far- 
rar to fall back." The Gresham command left the Egypt 
Road at Mitchel's Ford, crossing Second Creek at that 
point, thence down the Independence Road, through "Inde- 
pendence" plantation, and when within two miles of Beverly 
but still on the Independence Road and north of its junction 
with the east and west road through Beverly to Kingston, 
they met Colonel Farrar falhng back, skirmishing with the 
enemy. Adams had dismounted most of his cavalry and 
cut across the country in addition to pressing Farrar on the 
road into Beverly. Sergeant Lindsay of General Adams's 
artillery, still hale and hearty at seventy-five, in 191 6 
related to me this skirmish as he saw it: 

"The night before the skirmish we rested on our arms 
in the road between Ellis Cliffs and Beverly; long before 
daylight we were on the move, and at daylight opened on 
the Federal cavalry at Beverly, preceding the advance of 
the Eleventh and Seventeenth Arkansas under Colonel 
Griffith, dismounted and thrown out as skirmishers. Mean- 
time, Colonel Dumontiel of the Fourteenth Confederate 
Cavalry under orders pressed the enemy's left flank. The 
Wirt Adams regiment, the wagon train, and the rear guard 
followed." 

In this skirmish between Farrar and Adams, two men 
were killed and four wounded, one of the wounded being 
Captain WauUow of the Fourth Illinois. What was then 
an open cultivated country is now, owing to the boll weevil 
and other causes, largely abandoned as farming land. 
Second growth timber pines are taking the place of the 
native trees. 



278 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

Doctor Scott owned "Independence" plantation. On 
it were about forty negro slaves, many of whom had been 
brought from Forrest Home twenty miles up in Jefferson 
County when the war first began. One of them, a very in- 
telligent colored man, Charles Wood, whom Captain John 
F. Jenkins had known from boyhood, witnessed the cavalry 
skirmish and helped bury one of the Yankee soldiers where 
he fell, "face downward, so he could not scratch out." 
"Many of the negroes were still loyal and gave us infor- 
mation the same as they did to the Yankees," said Captain 
Bowie. 

Adams then being in possession of the junction of the 
Independence and Kingston roads, and having his line of 
retreat open to the east, a retreat was sounded in order to 
decoy him north of Second Creek, with a view to turning 
on him while he would be in the low bottoms north of 
Second Creek. The cannon was planted in a thicket below 
the mansion at "Beaux Pres," since burned, so as to sweep 
the bottom and the ford. But Adams would not cross. He 
retreated to Kingston, and thence to Meadville. Captain 
Bowie said, "We knew of the masked battery. We did 
not want to charge over ground that our enemy had chosen, 
and besides, the object of our expedition had been accom- 
plished, as I believed." 

In his report to General McPherson, General Gresham 
said; "General Adams has two ten-pound Parrot guns, 
four six-pound rifle guns, and four twelve-pounders, and 
at least 2,500 men — perhaps more — that much you can 
rely on. Doctor Lyle of this place saw Adams Saturday 
and talked with him, and counted ten pieces of artillery. 
He described the artillery and the men as above." Doctor 
Lyle was then and long afterward one of the leading phys- 
icians of Natchez, and never was there any question in 
Natchez of his loyalty to the Confederacy until, years 
afterwards, I showed in Natchez a copy of this report to 
General McPherson. 



MINOR WARFARE- — R E - E N L I S T M E N T S 279 

Doctor Lyle had been with the Confederates at Shiloh as 
a surgeon. He probably had seen enough of war. He and 
every man, especiaUy any ex-Confederate, and there were 
several in and about Natchez who had been incapacitated 
for the field by wounds, were always welcome at head- 
quarters at "Rosalie." There was the cigar and the toddy 
to the Southern man's taste, and no man could be more 
cordial and considerate of the sensibilities of his guests than 
my husband. At that time he considered he was fortunate 
in being able to show by his conduct "that a return to their 
former allegiance involved no humiliation." Besides, there 
were McPherson's instructions and money to pay all bills. 
What kind of vouchers ultimately went into the Treasury 
Department some other historian than I must write of. 
So if the good doctor yielded to his impulses and gave or 
got information for the Yankees' general, he must not 
be censured for helping end a cause which he knew was 
bound to be lost and which he may have regarded with 
misgivings even before Gettysburg and Vicksburg. 

That Doctor Lyle was met in the public road south of 
Washington by General Adams's command at or about the 
time stated in the report to General McPherson, Captain 
Bowie says is true. Furthermore, Bowie says that he re- 
quired two Confederate troopers to restore the horses that 
these two soldiers were taking from the good doctor. Cap- 
tain Bowie had known the doctor before the war and kept 
up the acquaintance until his death. 

But the accuracy of the doctor's report Captain Bowie 
questions. "Wirt Adams had but six efficient guns." A 
section of King's mounted artillery was commanded by 
Lieutenant Johnson and Sergeant George W. Lindsay. In 
March, 1916, Sergeant Lindsay said: "My recollection is 
we had eight guns." 

Continuing, Captain Bowie said: "We had 1,700 or 
1,800 men — the original Wirt Adams regiment, then called 
the Wood regiment and commanded by Colonel R. C. Wood. 



28o LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

I remember Colonel Dumontiel commanded the Fourteenth 
Confederate Cavalry. Colonel Griffith commanded two 
regiments of Arkansas mounted infantry, the Eleventh and 
Seventeenth consolidated into one. Before being mounted 
these regiments had carried positions at the point of the 
bayonet, and although mounted retained the same arms 
and accoutrements, even their drums for camp signals. 
They were mounted infantry in every sense of the term. 
Our troops were seasoned veterans, the remnants of the 
flower of the Confederate calvary, and our general a brave, 
capable, and experienced leader." Captain Bowie con- 
cluded with a statement that is undoubtedly true of both 
sides: "Many details and orders never were recorded and 
the records of many others were destroyed." 

To illustrate what a scout or spy could do. Sergeant 
Lindsay, while on a leave of absence from Wirt Adams's 
command, went into Natchez, stayed all night with a good 
Confederate family, the Holdens, and the next morning 
called on the Yankee provost-marshal and secured a pass 
out of Natchez. He represented to the provost-marshal 
that he was a Missourian who had been caught in Missis- 
sippi when the war began and could not get out, that he 
had escaped conscription by taking to the swamps when 
the drafting officers came about. Armed with his pass, 
Lindsay hired a horse and buggy from Joe Bontura, drove 
out in good style and carried with him a lot of medicines, 
contraband of war. (After the war Lindsay returned to 
Bontura his buggy and another horse.) A few days later, 
while stopping wdth a friend near Kingston, Lindsay learned 
that three Confederate deserters, "Jayhawkers," were in 
his vicinity. These men had stolen a lot of horses and 
negroes and were making for Georgia for the purpose of 
selling them. The Emancipation Proclamation was not 
yet in effect in Georgia. One of these "Jayhawkers," John 
Benton, previously married to six Mississippi women and 
who had but recently at Woodville married his seventh wife, 



MINOR WARFARE — RE-ENLISTMENTS 281 

was making his boast that before the war closed he would 
have a wife in every county in Mississippi. With the aid 
of a single man Lindsay surprised these "Jayhawkers" as 
they were crossing Second Creek, making for the Homo- 
chitto Swamps, killed them and restored the stolen property 
to the owners. 

"General Gresham heard of the affair," said Sergeant 
Lindsay in 1916. "He sent me word I had rendered a ser- 
vice to both sides, that he had heard I was short of clothes, 
and if I would come to Natchez he would have made for 
me a brand new Confederate uniform and provide a safe 
conduct in and out, which was evidenced by a pass. Al- 
though I had no doubt, from what I had heard of him, 
of his good faith, I feared I might be misunderstood if 
I accepted his offer. Besides, I was operating without 
orders and might meet a court martial on my return to my 
command; but on the contrary, I received the same com- 
mendation from General Adams that I had from General 
Gresham, for whom I always had a great admiration, and 
it has been one of my regrets that I never met him. I 
never regarded him as a 'Yankee.'" 

This incident of Sergeant Lindsay will at least tend to 
explain why Walter Q. Gresham, while still on crutches, 
said, ' ' I will swap a carpet-bagger or a scalawag for a good 
Confederate soldier any day."' By this I do not mean to 
condemn all men who went vSouth or settled in the South 
after the war. 

Headquarters, United States Forces, 

Natchez, December 26, 1863 

Christmas is over, but it is holiday here yet. I was very 
busy yesterday, as usual. . . . 

I can't say that I had a merry Christmas, for I felt that I 
ought to be at home. Since I entered the service I have never 
felt so blue at being separated from you and the children as I 
did yesterday. I hope it was not the case with you. I do not 

1 Introductory, page xxi. 



282 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

understand why you don't come to me when the opportunity 
is afforded. 

I went out to Mr. Sam Davis' yesterday at 4 p. m. to dine. 
The party consisted of Mr. and Mrs. Davis, Dr. and Mrs. Page 
and the two Miss Pages, Doctor Carter, Mr. Sargent, Mr. 
Elijah Smith, Captain Babbitt and myself. It was the finest 
dinner I ever sat down to. I saw Judge McMurran to-day and 
he and Mrs. McMurran desire to be remembered to you. I 
don't go out much for several reasons, the main one of which is 
because I have no time. 

I neglected to say that Mrs. Page sends her kindest regards 
to you. I am at her home more frequently than at any other 
place. She informed me this morning that she would present 
me with a pair of elegant slippers as a New Year's present, the 
work of her own hands. 

I wrote you a week or more ago to come down, if you wished 
to. The navigation of the river is not so perilous now as it was 
some time back. If you have not started before this reaches 
you, I will still say, do as you think best about bringing the 
children. I would like to see them, but I don't like to ask you 
to bring them along, for fear something might happen. 

A later letter from Vicksburg began wdth this sentence: 
"A boat was fired on at Rodney yesterday and two women 
killed." It closed with an intimation that I did not have a 
very great affection for my husband when I neglected an 
opportunity to come to him when he could not get home. 

Running the gantlet from Memphis to Natchez on a 
frail Mississippi River steamboat did not seem to me an 
ideal opportunity to visit my husband, but finally, on the 
last day of January, 1864, I mustered up my courage, took 
my two children, and went from New Albany by rail to 
Cairo, thence to Memphis by a steamboat, and there late 
in the afternoon transferred to another boat. Memphis 
was out of sight when I discovered our boat was loaded to 
the guards, as the saying is, with powder and ammunition. 
The cargo was in the hold and I saw^ no evidence of it when 
I went on the boat. 



MINOR WARFARE — R E - E N L I S T M E N T S 283 

In those days it seemed a legitimate act of war to 
prevent ammunition getting to the Yankee soldiers. Per- 
haps because the Rebels were shooting from the bank there 
was no representation on Mr. Lincoln's part to the President 
of the Confederate States of America, that the latter was 
not making war according to the ancient humane rules of 
warfare. While the Confederates did not discriminate 
between boats carrying ammunition and those that did 
not, still as their spies endeavored to send advance infor- 
mation as to the boats carrying ammunition, the hazards 
were immeasurably greater on the former than on the 
latter. On a boat without ammunition one might get 
through. With my knowledge of conditions on the Missis- 
sippi at that time, let no one believe I would have gone on 
that boat at Memphis had I known it was loaded with 
ammunition. 

We ate supper by dim lights and then all lights were 
extinguished. "I expect to be fired on to-night," the 
captain said. I put my children to bed with their clothes 
on and sat in the cabin by their stateroom door. I could 
hear the throb of the engines as the boat was crowded to 
her utmost speed, as I had heard the captain say he would 
do, to get through. 

The boat ahead of us was fired into and sunk, and the 
boat behind us was riddled, but we went through without 
even a shot being fired at us. At the landing at Vicksburg 
I was met by Mr. James Doll of New Albany, who told me 
my husband was on what was called the Meridian Expedi- 
tion. Mr. Doll was then conducting a sutlers' store in 
Vicksburg. From the note Mr. Doll handed me from my 
husband, dated Vicksburg, January 25, 1864, I quote: 

I arrived here yesterday with part of my command, the 
Twelfth Wisconsin and the Thirty-second Illinois, to join an 
expedition eastward. We may have a good time and we 
may not. We go strong enough to take care of ourselves 
almost anywhere. 



284 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

Meanwhile, I went to board at the house at which Mrs. 
Davis, the wife of the Heutenant-colonel of the Twenty- 
third Indiana, with her children, was stopping. I was 
there several weeks. The cannonball holes were still in 
the houses, and the children played in the caves that the 
people made during the siege. I remember one morning 
when we got up, the hills were fringed with snow, an unusual 
sight for Vicksburg. 

General Sherman's army comprised 20,000 men, ^ two 
divisions under General Hurlbut, who came down from 
Memphis, and two divisions under General McPherson. 
One of McPherson's divisions was commanded by General 
Crocker. In Crocker's division General Gresham com- 
manded a brigade. General Sooey Smith was to move 
from Memphis to Meridian with 7,000 cavalry and de- 
feat Forrest on the way. General Smith failed to defeat 
Forrest and never reached Meridian, but otherwise the 
expedition was a success. Out and back, they marched 
from 370 to 400 miles. 

The purpose of the Meridian Expedition was to de- 
stroy the supplies and foundries at Meridian, 150 miles 
east of Vicksburg, at the junction of the Mobile and 
Ohio Railroad and the Vicksburg and Selma Railroad, also 
the railroads north and south, and east and west of 
Meridian, as well as all personal property that had been 
and could be of any possible use to sustain an army in the 
field. General Sherman's destruction of private property 
the Southern people never could understand. On the 
other hand, to fire into steamboats on the Mississippi 
without first ascertaining whether they were carrying arms 
to the enemy, to say nothing of giving the passengers an 
opportunity to get off, was a departure from the previous 
rules of war. 

That the work of destruction and devastation, in which 
I have heard my husband repeatedly declare he had no 
heart, was most thoroughly done, I afterwards learned from 



MINOR WARFARE — RE-ENLISTMENTS 285 

many of the Southern people. It was perhaps more com- 
plete than was visited on other sections of the country 
during the war. I heard the discussion afterwards and 
saw many of the orders, which were most specific, to destroy 
everything, even of a private nature, that could be used 
by the enemy. ^ 

As the}^ returned from the Meridian Expedition, my 
husband sent for me to meet him at General Crocker's 
headquarters at Hebron on Black River, nine miles north- 
east of Vicksburg. I left Vicksburg March 4, 1864, with 
my children, in an ambulance at nine o'clock in the morn- 
ing, expecting to reach General Crocker's headquarters at 
early noon. Instead, it was five o'clock in the evening when 
we arrived there. Soon after leaving Vicksburg we met the 
head of a column of 10,000 "contraband" negroes, as they 
were called, moving to Vicksburg. At times the crowds 
would be so dense that we would be compelled to drive into 
the fields ; then there would be a break and we would drive 
on perhaps a half mile or more, when the throng would 
block the road and we would be forced to the side. They 
seemed to sweep the earth. 

It would be invaluable now to have photographs of those 
scenes. The blacks were in all kinds of vehicles, family 
carriages, farm wagons, sutler wagons, on horseback, on 
mules, on oxen, and on foot. What was once a handsome 
family carriage would be drawn by a horse and a mule, or 
a mule and an ox. One colored woman had on a French 
bonnet, another a Paisley shawl, another had a lace parasol, 
and many had some admired article of some woman of 
affluence. Some of the men wore silk hats yet were with- 
out coats ; all showed unmistakable evidences of the ravages 

1 I quote from W. Q. Gresham's report to General Crocker, commanding the Fourth 
Division, Seventeenth Army Corps. This report went to General Sherman finally. "Two 
miles south of Quitman I destroyed a large covered railroad bridge over the Chickasha, 210 feet 
long. At the same place I destroyed 1,700 feet of trestle from 10 to 30 feet high. I also 
destroyed all the bridges and trestles over Alligator Swamp, which were a mile and a half in 
length and from 11 to 32 feet high. For two miles north of Alligator Swamp I destroyed the 
road, burning the ties, and heating and bending the rails." 

19 



286 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

of war. Many of the sutler wagons were loaded to over- 
flowing with pickaninnies. 

We were welcomed by General Crocker in the Hebron 
mansion, which he occupied as his headquarters. It was 
a double house in the Colonial style, with a wide gallery 
and the conventional columns in front. One half of it 
General Crocker had assigned to my husband and his stafT. 
Hebron proper was a store and postoffice a mile and a half 
aw^ay. Black River was a couple of miles east, and the 
point where the Vicksburg & Jackson Railroad crossed 
Black River was several miles southeast. There were 
military roads and camps in every direction. Fifty years 
later, when I visited Hebron, only the ruins of the mansion 
remained. To every soldier in Sherman's army Hebron was 
a well-known place. 

Within an hour after being greeted by General Crocker, 
I was called out to meet my husband riding at the head of 
a party returning from "their raid," as Captain Babbitt 
called it. It was a happy party. My husband was always 
fond of a joke "on the other fellow." He deprecated all 
wanton foraging, against which General McPherson had 
issued strict orders. And when Babbitt drew attention to 
the fact that there was an onion in General Gresham's 
coat-tail pocket — which Babbitt had slipped in as they 
dismounted from their horses — my husband was palpably 
annoyed. Onions were a luxury at that time in Sherman's 
army. 

That evening we were all General Crocker's guests for 
dinner, at which the talk was about the war. After dinner 
the General directed the conversation by saying: "Mrs. 
Gresham witnessed a sight to-day she will never forget." 
General Crocker was as much a master of his profession — 
the law — as Grant and Sherman were of theirs. His 
strong legal mind made things clear to the average mind. 
He had newspapers. Congressional records, and all kinds 
of poHtical pamphlets. "That Thirteenth Amendment 



MINOR WARFARE — R E - E NL I S T M E N T S 287 

which my Iowa man started through the House [James F. 
Wilson, December 14, 1863] has been reported favorably 
by the Judiciary Committee of the Senate [February 10, 
1864] and will undoubtedly pass that body by the requisite 
two-thirds, but what do you men from Indiana think when 
I tell you that dough-faced senator of yours is opposed to 
making the negroes, in theory as they are in fact, free?" 
Democrat that he always was, Marcus M. Crocker was 
particularly severe on Thomas A. Hendricks. Chafing at 
his physical disability, tuberculosis, which had kept him 
from going to Meridian, he gave full rein to the violence of 
his language. He had written to and had letters from 
James F. Wilson. 

On the military side General Crocker, according to 
General Grant, was one of the volunteers who was fit to 
command a corps or army; on the civil side, he must have 
been one of the men Mr. Lincoln had in mind, "fit for 
any position." When the war broke out, he was a leading 
lawyer of Des Moines. Always a Democrat in politics ex- 
cept as to prosecuting the war to a finish, General Crocker 
opposed visiting the pains and penalties of treason on the 
Southern people and was emphatic that the negro should 
be kept on the plantations. He was for making the freed- 
men citizens but not voters. 

The discussion went on until a late hour. That there 
would be bitterness and resentment toward the blacks, that 
it was a misfortune for them to leave the plantations, that 
many would become drones and vagabonds, that they must 
for a time be the wards of a nation, and that they should 
be made citizens with the right to sue and testify in court, 
all were agreed, but that the men of that motley crew should 
be given the ballot, not a single man who was present that 
evening suggested, and when it was later proposed, these 
men were against it. The denunciation of Senator Thomas 
A. Hendricks of Indiana then and later was the most bitter 
and severe I ever heard. Of charming personality, forcible, 



2^8 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

an accomplished debater and an adept in the art of manag- 
ing men, Thomas A. Hendricks unfortunately fitted into 
that class of Democrats described by Governor Morton as 
men "riding backwards in a railroad train. They never 
see the right side of a measure until the train passes it." 
During our stay at Hebron the debate in the Senate on 
the proposed Thirteenth Amendment continued. ^ April 6, 
1864, by a vote of thirty-eight to six the Senate voted to 
ratify it. The six votes in the negative were cast by Sena- 
tor Hendricks, Senator McDougall of California, and two 
senators from Kentucky and two from Delaware, but in the 
House Senator Hendricks's influence prevented its passage. 
Every Democrat in the House from Indiana voted against 
its submission. At the election in the Fall of 1862 the Dem- 
ocrats had carried Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and Ilhnois. 
The coming expiration of the term of service of many 
of General Sherman's command suspended his operations. 
Otherwise he would most likely have gone to Selma or 
Mobile. At least this was my husband's view. The gov- 
ernment did not wait for the period of enlistment to arrive, 
but took time by the forelock. Before the Meridian Ex- 
pedition began, inducements and powerful pressure were 
brought to bear on the veterans to re-enUst. This was to 
counteract the appeals of the "Dough-faces" and the "Cop- 
perheads"— I am using the language of the times — to the 
three-year men to refuse to re-enUst and thereby end the 
war. Emissaries were sent to them and letters were written 
to them. Walter Q. Gresham was one of the officers who 
was assigned, but not by any formal order, to speak and 
personally appeal in February and March, 1864, to the 
veterans to re-enhst. Unfortunately none of the speeches 
of the soldier orators of that time were preserved. 

1 Senator John B. Henderson, the slaveholder of Missouri, and Reverdy Johnson of 
Maryland spoke in favor of it, while Thomas A. Hendricks's voice was against it. 

In the Missouri Constitutional Convention of 1863, Judge Breckenridge said: "Two 
years of war to perpetuate slavery has done more for abolition than all the Abolitionists. 
The young and able-bodied farm-hands are running away, leaving only the aged and infirm. 
The way to keep the able-bodied workmen is to abolish slavery at once." 



MINOR WARFARE — RE-ENLISTMENTS 289 

Among the papers General Crocker had for my husband 
was an account of a mass meeting held February 3, 1863, 
in Shelbyville, Indiana, Senator Hendricks's home. There 
were Democrats from that town and county in Sherman's 
army and throughout the armies of the Union. In his 
speech the Senator had said : 

Gentlemen, what is the effect upon you at home when you 
see the purpose of this war changed from a contest for the Union 
and Constitution to a contest to free the negroes"' What is the 
effect upon your manly pride ? What is the effect upon the army 
in the field? I think I can comprehend something of the honor, 
something of the pride the soldier feels as he stands upon the 
field and the missiles of death are flying around him. In the 
midst of that trying scene, testing all the high qualities of a sol- 
dier, when he looks up to that flag and thinks it the emblem of 
the United States under the Constitution, when he is fighting the 
battles of that flag, he feels that he is fighting a glorious war, and 
he can do his duty faithfully. But when the proclamation of 
January i, 1863, is issued, and he is told that he shall make it his 
business to fight to make negroes free, where has the pride of the 
soldier gone? Can he fight in such a battle as that? He can- 
not do it. 

Then after playing on the prejudice that existed against 
admitting the negro to the ranks, Senator Hendricks used 
these expressions: 

We have elected a majority of the next House of Represent- 
atives. . . . But that Congress will not meet until next December 
and until that time the government will be under the control of 
the Abolitionists. It may be that events will settle the question 
before that time. If it goes on a Httle while longer as it has 
been going since the President issued his proclamation, it is go- 
ing against us. 

Walter Q. Gresham's retort to this argument was: 

When it was simply a question of the Union and the Con- 
stitution in 1 86 1 and 1862, did Thomas A. Hendricks advise any 
man to enlist? On the contrary, you know he advised exactly 
the contrary. Re-enlist, and before that dishonorable Congress 



290 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

will have adjourned, the honorable man in the field with a gun in 
his hands will have surrendered. 

In the convention that nominated Horatio Seymour 
for Governor of New York in 1864, the house was brought 
down when Judge Miller of Ohio said : ' ' There is no real 
difference between a War Democrat and an Abolitionist — they 
arc links of one sausage, made out of the same dog.'' While 
expressions like these encouraged the vSouthern leaders and 
their soldiers to continue the fight, on the other hand, they 
aroused the Democratic veteran to a fury that led him to 
re-enlist. 

A single instance will illustrate the workings of the 
soldier mind and show how the "Dough-face" and the 
"Copperhead" failed to understand him. Adam Stoker was 
one of Ben Gresham's Third Indiana Cavalry men, who, in 
May, 1864, although but two years out of his teens, had 
finished his term of three years' service and returned home 
declaring he had had enough of war. He had been at 
Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Antietam, Gettysburg and 
in almost every other engagement in which the Army of the 
Potomac had participated. "I was Colonel Ben's orderly 
when he called on Joe Hooker, and told him how he thought 
the Army of the Potomac should be handled." Adam was 
a Democrat, born in Lanesville of German parents, and had 
been reared in the Roman Catholic faith, as were most of 
the Germans of that neighborhood. The day following his 
return he went to Lanesville and walked into Antone Endris' 
saloon, where a dozen men were standing, half of whom 
belonged to the Knights of the Golden Circle. He ordered 
drinks for the crowd, in honor of the government of the 
United States. As Antone set out the glasses, he said 
with a sneer, "Adam, I'm glad you're through fighting 
for them baboons." Adam flared up, and with many 
expressions that would not look well in print, exclaimed: 
"Antone, when Father Alfonzo takes that baboon into the 
confessional and grants him absolution, hasn't that baboon 



MINOR WARFARE — R E - E NL I S T M E N T S 291 

got as good a soul as you?" Friends had a hard time pre- 
venting a fight, and the next day Adam rode to Cory don, 
hunted up Samuel J. Wright, the enrolling officer for our 
district, and re-enlisted for the war. Later Adam was at 
Appomattox and, although never very devout, was hale 
and hearty at three-score and ten. 

Perhaps due consideration was not shown the man who 
did not want to re-enlist. But few could stand it to become 
an object of suspicion, to be considered a coward, a traitor. 
Only one man of all those Walter Q. Gresham went after, 
did he fail to induce to re-enlist. Sergeant Abel of the 
Twenty- third Indiana was that man. Under threats of 
being reduced to the ranks, Abel remained firm. For 
twenty-eight years he cherished his resentment and only 
forgave that brigadier-general when the latter voted for 
Grover Cleveland in 1892. At Hebron, Mississippi, the 
Twenty-third and Fifty-third Indiana Volunteers almost 
bodily re-enlisted under the promise of a furlough home. 
The same was true of all other regiments then in Mississippi. 

If the government at Richmond did not appreciate the 
situation, the Southern press did. Commenting on the re- 
enlistments of the Union soldiers, the Richmond Examiner 
expressed its regret, while the Mobile Register said, "And 
we are called upon to believe that mobs of raw recruits, 
half starved and poorly equipped, are to do next spring 
what veterans have not been able to do after three years' 
hard and repeated trials." 

At Hebron we lived in the mansion but had our meals 
in camp. General Crocker's cook was a tall bony contra- 
band. She persisted in regarding me as a Yankee. She 
would not believe I was from Kentucky. My woman's 
instinct concluded, what the general officers scouted at, 
that she was a spy. To the very last, what many of my 
New England friends cannot believe and understand, the 
negro was unswervingly loyal to his master, and in many 
instances, as I have heard ex-Confederate officers say, 



292 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

negroes served as Confederate spies. Vegetables were very 
scarce at Hebron. I was the curiosity of the camp when I 
undertook to do some cooking over a campfire because I 
tired of army rations. In trying to make a cake I asked 
for some milk. "Wait until I milk the cow," said a soldier. 
It reminded me of Memphis. The soldiers almost killed 
our children by feeding them everything they ate them- 
selves and could buy at the sutler's. 

I left Black River with a brigade under my husband's 
command bound for the North as veterans on veterans' 
furlough. At Vicksburg Mrs. Davis and I demurred about 
going on boats with soldiers. But we finally went on the 
boat that carried the Fifty-third and Twenty-third Indiana 
regiments, packed in Hke sardines. The rear of the long 
cabin was partitioned off for the officers and their headquar- 
ters. The soldiers occupied the front cabin, the lower or 
boiler deck, the "Texas," and outside the cabins on the 
guards. They slept out with nothing but their blankets 
and apparently enjoyed it. They played cards, drank, 
talked politics, cursed Tom Hendricks and the "Copper- 
heads," and boasted of what they would do when they got 
back to the front. They cooked on the boiler deck around 
the engines and in the cabins. The boat was on fire a 
great many times — continuously so, it seemed to me. 
One night I roused my husband and told him to put my 
children and myself on shore. He pacified me by putting 
a guard around the boiler. It was almost as dangerous 
as going from Memphis to Vicksburg on a boat loaded with 
ammunition and expecting to be fired on any minute. 

Late one cold, clear night we landed at Evansville. 
The guards were carpeted with sleeping forms covered only 
with a blanket, with a knapsack for a pillow. The river 
was high and we were well up to the level of the city. Sud- 
denly the stillness was broken by a gun fired from the bow 
of the boat. Instantly, it seemed, every sleeping form was 
on its feet and every musket discharged. Evansville was 



MINOR WARFARE — RE-ENLISTMENTS 293 

alive, men and women were in the streets and down to the 
levee, to the great amusement of the "boys." Perhaps 
this was not discipline, the professional soldier will say; 
but every one of these men was a sovereign. General 
Sherman was waiting for them, and he was more consider- 
ate of their lives than of the lives of his generals. 

The next morning, at Rockport, Colonel Jones and half 
of the Fifty-third left us. The following morning we tied 
up at the ship yard at lower New Albany. Soon the 
camp-fires were burning on the river bank, and I had the 
first moment of relief since leaving Vicksburg. Men and 
officers scattered to their homes. The Twenty-third Indi- 
ana, as stated before, had been organized at New Albany. 
Its colonel, W. L. Sanderson, and its Lieutenant-Colonel, 
W. P. Davis, were residents there. It was the home of 
Captain Babbitt and many others, and great was the joy. 



CHAPTER XVIII 
THE ATLANTA CAMPAIGN 



GRESHAM APPOINTED TO TAKE CROCKER S COMMAND 

BATTLE OF KENESAW MOUNTAIN A SOLDIER's VIEW OF 

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN GRANT AND SHERMAN AS COM- 
MANDERS GRESHAM WOUNDED AT ATLANTA — -CARRIED TO 

NEW ALBANY MCPHERSON's DEATH GRESHAM DISABLED 

FOR FIVE YEARS. 

1\ /FY husband's orders, after a short furlough, were to re- 
^^■*- turn to Natchez and take command there. But Gen- 
eral Sherman, whose activities were about to be renewed 
by the return of the furloughed veterans, had other work for 
these veterans and for the brigadier who had been used to 
induce them to re-enlist. Our happiness was cut short by 
an order from General McPherson for General Gresham 
to leave for Cairo, there to take command of a division of 
furloughed men who were assembling, and then join Gen- 
eral Sherman's army as part of the Seventeenth Army Corps 
of the Army of the Tennessee, commanded by General 
McPherson in the advance on Atlanta. 

Soon the letters began coming. In my anxiety I studied 
my map. From Cairo, under date of April 27, 1864: 

I leave here tonight at 12 o'clock with my division. I have 
two brigades commanded by Colonel M alloy of the Seventeenth 
Wisconsin and Colonel Potts of the Twenty-third Ohio; we also 
have the First Minnesota Battery and a hospital corps. We go 
up the Tennessee River and receive orders again at Clifton, which 
is about thirty miles below Savannah, Tennessee. We will likely 
go from there to Huntsville by way of Pulaski. 

Captain Babbitt is not here yet. I suppose he is drunk. 

In one of the letters after they reached Clifton is this 
sentence: "Babbitt is marching with his company." In 

294 



THE ATLANTA CAMPAIGN 295 

the field Babbitt always proved his worth. From a letter 
of July 15, 1864, Chattahoochee, Georgia, I quote: 

The non-veterans of the Twenty-third will go home in a few 
days. Captain Babbitt has been selected for lieutenant-colonel 
of the regiment, and his trip home is to get his commission. 
Babbitt is a gallant officer and I am glad he has been or is about 
to be promoted. He is a devoted friend of mine, notwithstanding 
I have blown him up on more than one occasion. He will make a 
good colonel. Colonel Jones of the Fifty-third will resign as soon 
as this campaign is ended. The old man is failing in strength, 
and he feels it. 

But a cannon ball anticipated the old man's resignation. 

Meantime the trip up the Ohio and Tennessee to Clifton 
in the spring of the year was beautiful beyond description. 
They took along with them 3,000 head of cattle for Gen- 
eral Sherman's army, and marched via Pulaski, Tennessee, 
to Athens, Alabama. The celebrated Confederate General 
Forrest, General Gresham wrote, endeavored to cut them 
off by coming in from the northeast by way of Florence — 

When we were about thirty miles from Pulaski, and then 
commenced a forced march, and made Pulaski in one day. I 
was only five days coming from Clifton here [Athens], a distance 
of ninety-five miles, and lay over half a day at Pulaski and the 
same time at Prospect for information, so we really marched the 
whole distance in four days. The men bore the terrible hard- 
ship without a murmur, believing that it was necessary to pre- 
vent Forrest from cutting our lines of communication. I saw 
men marching yesterday with blood oozing out of the toes of 
their shoes. The object was to cut General Sherman's com- 
munication and force him to fall back for want of supplies. The 
men were in fine trim and we would have given Forrest a stiff 
fight if we had got together. We may have to fight him yet, for 
I can't learn where he is. 

Huntsville, Alabama, where they remained several days, 
is certainly the most beautiful town I ever saw. There 
they found the Fifty-ninth Indiana, in which was Lieu- 
tenant Slemmons, the son of our family physician, old 



296 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

Doctor Slemmons. My husband endeavored to get him 
detailed from his regiment for staff duty, but Colonel 
Martin was unwilling. Twenty-eight years later there 
was correspondence with Lieutenant Slemmons as to why, 
as a former Republican, Walter Q. Gresham should vote 
for Grover Cleveland for President. ^ 

At Huntsville they were met by General Blair with the 
balance of the Seventeenth Army Corps, and then all went 
to the front together. General Crocker took command of 
the division. But at Decatur, a few days later, on May 
27, General Crocker, who was in failing health and went 
home to die within a year, asked to be relieved and that 
Gresham be put in command of the division. "General 
McPherson and General Sherman are both well pleased 
with me, and my prospects for permanent command are 
pretty good. Our division is one of the largest in the de- 
partment. It numbers 7,000 men for duty." 

From Rome, Georgia, under date of June 5 : "We have 
been as late as 4 a. m. getting into camp some evenings 
since we have been on the march." From Kingston, 
Georgia, June 7 : " We will reach General Sherman to- 
morrow. He has sent word that he is waiting for us, and 
has been for five or six days. I am fearful my division 
will be too much fatigued when we arrive at the front to 
do much for several days." But General Sherman thought 
differently when they joined him the next day at Ackworth 
and the Fourth Division went on the advance on the left 
flank. Immediately the mortality began. At Big Shanty 
they met the Thirty-eighth Indiana and Colonel Dan 
Griffin, and also my brother-in-law Rice Payne, the surgeon 
of the Sixty-sixth Indiana. 

The following letters came to me at this time : 

Headquarters, Kenesaw Mountain, Ga., 

June 21, 1864 
I have been too much engaged for several days to write you. 
I wrote Mr. Slaughter after our first day's operations; that is, 

1 See page 670. 



THE ATLANTA CAMPAIGN 297 

after our first engagement with the enemy. That was about 
noon of the iSth inst. We made a gallant charge in connection 
with General Arterhouse on my right, and carried the enemy's 
first line of works. 

My loss was mostly confined to the Iowa Brigade and the 
Twelfth Wisconsin of my old brigade. We have been fighting 
now every day since the 13th and my loss nmiibers 124. The 
Twenty-third Indiana has had eight killed. I do not know the 
number of wounded. The Fifty-third has had four killed — 
Corydon boys all well and safe. 

Day before yesterday the enemy left his strong position in 
our front, and we advanced skirmishing and under fire of his 
artillery until we came to his third line of works at the foot of 
the mountains, and there we are now. We are pressing him hard 
at all points, and that has forced him to give up part of his line to 
concentrate. Captain Spear's battery has the honor of killing 
the Rebel General Polk. Others claim the honor, but there is no 
doubt about Spear's guns doing the work, for men that we cap- 
tured the day of the charge pointed out to me just where Polk 
was killed, which is undoubtedly in my old front. General 
McPherson and General Sherman both say my division has the 
honor of killing the Rebel bishop and general. 

We may have a general engagement any day. There was 
very heavy firing on the right yesterday afternoon, but I have 
heard nothing from the Araiy of the Cumberland as yet. The 
Army of the Tennessee is on the left. The Seventeenth Army 
Corps is on the left of the Army of the Tennessee and my division 
is on the left of the Seventeenth Army Corps. Marietta is in 
plain view of the left of my line, and we salute the town with shell 
at our leisure. 

I have not heard from the Thirty-eighth or Sixty-sixth for 
a week; we have no time to visit. 

Headquarters, Kenesaw Mountain, Ga., 

June 27, 1864 
At 8 A. M. to-day we assault the enemy's works. My orders 
may give me a great deal to do and then my work may not be so 
heavy. But I presume we will all be satisfied by sundown that 
we have had enough to do. . . . 



298 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

Headquarters, Kenesaw Mountain, Ga., 

June 28, 1864 
I wrote you yesterday morning that we were about going 
into an engagement. I came out all right. The Fifty-third Indi- 
ana and Sixteenth Iowa suffered pretty heavily Major Vestal's 
old company was almost annihilated. Captain Wakefield was 
captured, but not until he was wounded. Lieutenant Marsh of 
the same company was mortally wounded. Captain White of 
Company " I " was killed on the enemy's works. Lieutenant Dill- 
ingham of the same company leaped on the parapets, struck at a 
Rebel officer with his saber, and fell back with three wounds. 
The regiment distinguished itself, and I am proud of it. I tried 
hard to teach the boys to be good soldiers, and I succeeded. Jim 
Clark is badly wounded, but I think he will recover. The Corydon 
boys are all well. Send word to Clark's father, who lives about 
four miles from Corydon, that I have seen his son and that he is 
cheerful and hopeful. He fell when he was nobly doing his duty. 
I will see that he is cared for, for he is too gallant a soldier to be 
neglected. We had a sharp fight and did well. 

Headquarters, Kenesaw Mountain, Ga., 

July 2, 1864 
I seize an opportunity to write you a note before we move. 
I may not have another opportunity for several days. You will 
hear the result of our movement through the press before another 
letter reaches you. Don't be uneasy about me, for I am taking 
good care of myself and my health is good— very good. It is true 
there is no telling now what any day may bring forth. We learned 
yesterday evening that part of the Fifty-third boys that we 
supposed were captured on the 27th, were killed and have not yet 
been buried. It is hard, but we can't help it. We had to give 
up the ground we had gained before we could take care of all of 
our killed and wounded. As it is, the poor boys have been de- 
nied burial. Captain Wakefield was captured — that was learned 
from the Atlanta papers. 

Headquarters, Near Chattahoochee River, Ga., 

July 4, 1864 
We are now on the extreme right of the army and only two 
miles from Chattahoochee River and eight miles from Atlanta. 



THE ATLANTA CAMPAIGN 299 

We expect to cross the river soon. I am on the extreme right of 
our Hnes. We moved up yesterday and drove the enemy from our 
present position, with the loss of five men. When we moved 
from the left to the right, the enemy drew back from our last 
position to re-form to our change, and General Sherman then 
went into Marietta, where he now has his headquarters. I will 
move forward to-day, marching on my right and in the direction 
of the river. We are now where we may engage the enemy any 
moment. I am in fine health and spirits; in fact, I enjo}^ the life. 
My division thus far has behaved splendidly — magnificently, 
and I am proud of it. 

We had a terrible march yesterday. The weather is hot 
beyond description. Several men fell dead from sunstroke. 

Headquarters. Eight Miles from Atlanta, Ga., 

July 8, 1864 

I wrote you on the Kenesaw Mountain. We were then on 
the extreme left and we are now on the extreme right. Our 
movements since I wrote last have induced the enemy to fall back 
and Marietta is now in our possession. We left Kenesaw and 
marched around the rear of our army (twelve miles) until we passed 
on their extreme right. I was in advance and we soon struck the 
enemy and, as the boys say, "went in." That day we marched 
twelve miles, and from 6 p.m. till dark drove four brigades of Rebel 
cavalry well supplied with artillery two miles. We are now five 
and a half miles from where we first struck the enemy on this 
flank, and we have fought for every inch of the ground. Day 
before yesterday was the hardest day we have had. We assaulted 
the enemy's works and captured them. That was two miles in 
rear of our present position. In that charge the Fifty-third was 
in reserve and did not suffer heavily. Don't know how many 
they lost, but Captain Beers is among the wounded. He was 
struck by a canister, but is not badly wounded. After taking 
the breastworks, we made another charge on the enemy stationed 
at Nickajack Creek. That charge was simply terrible. We 
were met by every missile used in war — grape, canister, shell, 
minie balls, etc. We took the creek and fortified our position, 
and last night I crossed and fortified again. 

General McPherson, General Logan, and General Blair were 



300 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

all on a high hill and witnessed our charge when we took Nickajack 
Creek, and they all spoke in high praise of us. I have a noble 
old division, I assure you, and I am proud of it. We have fought 
every day since the nth of June and have lost men every day. 
My loss in that time is over 450 men. I am tired but well. 

The enemy opened on us with his artillery last night just 
after dark. He used eighteen guns and his cannonading was 
awful. We hugged our works closely, and replied with artillery. 
Colonel Sanderson's horse was killed; we lost quite a niunber of 
horses, mules, and wagons, and had four men kihed and eleven 
wounded. 

I am feeling fine. You should be satisfied now, for there 
is not another brigadier in this army commanding a division, 
whose commission is not older than mine. I have now a good 
chance and am improving it. We don't get credit in the papers 
for what we do, because General Blair commands our corps. The 
papers are all down on him. He is a very clever gentleman. 

Headquarters, Chattahoochee River, Ga., 

July 10, 1S64 

The enemy abandoned his works last night, and under cover 
of darkness crossed the river and took up a position on the opposite 
side. We followed him up and at daybreak were in the works 
he abandoned at 3 a. m. He is now on the south side of the river, 
well entrenched, and we are on the north side. We have been 
hard at work all day digging trenches for our men and redoubts 
for our batteries. We will open on them in the morning, and the 
Rebs will find their line as uncomfortable as their old ones. To- 
day we have been fighting across the river. I made a narrow 
escape this morning on the skirmish line. I was out looking at the 
enemy's position and one of the men belonging to the Thirty- 
second Illinois was shot just by my side by a sharpshooter. 

We used to think it was something to fight or skirmish for 
a whole day, but now we have been fighting continually for over 
a month and our loss attests the character of our work. I am 
speaking within bounds when I say that few divisions in the army 
of the Tennessee or Cumberland have done as much as we have 
since we joined General Sherman's at Ackworth. The day we 
took Nickajack Creek we had a hard fight. We drove the enemy 



THE ATLANTA CAMPAIGN 301 

from a fine earthwork at the point of the bayonet, and then we 
took the Nickajack under a perfect shower of shell, shrapnel, and 
canister. General McPherson speaks in the highest terms of 
praise of us, and I can say to you that he has more than once 
spoken in terms complimentary of me as an officer. This, of 
course, is only for you. You know I never boasted of my own 
merits. 

The enemy is now entirely across the Chattahoochee and he 
will be farther south soon. Don't get discouraged. General 
Grant will whip Lee, and we can then whip Johnston. The 
Union can and will be maintained. It must be maintained. 

Headquarters, Chattahoochee River, Ga., 

July 12, 1864 

Am well and doing well. The enemy is on one side of the 
river and we are on the other. The boys are more friendly 
with each other than they have been heretofore. Yesterday and 
to-day they have been swimming together in the river. It looks 
strange to see squads of men meet in a friendly way and exchange 
tokens of regard, and the next moment go to fighting. Such is 
our war. 

To-morrow we will move around to the extreme left of our 
army and cross the river. We will have to march thirty miles. 
The Army of the Tennessee is not allowed to be idle, I assure you. 
General Sherman calls us the "cracker to his whip," and uses us 
to touch up the enemy's flanks. I sometimes feel disgusted and 
mad to see the way the papers puff some divisions and commands 
when they do so little in comparison with those that are scarcely 
mentioned. But it takes money to get notices in newspapers and 
we don't spend anything that way. 

Headquarters, Chattahoochee River, Ga., 

July 15, 1864 
We occupy the same position we did when I wrote you last, 
but we are hourly expecting orders to move. The weather is 
terribly hot; I think I suffer more from the heat than I did at 
Vicksburg last summer. My command is pretty well worn out. 
It has been very hard on the men from the fact that half of the 
time they have had to work after night, throwing up works. We 
20 



302 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

have now been in line of battle since the nth of June, and during 
that time have had some hard fighting. 

My health continues to be good. I have frequently told you 
that my health is always better when I am in action, and you 
ought to be convinced by this time that it is so. 

One bright day at noon the mail brought my last, my 
best, and shortest letter. It was from Decatur, Georgia: 
"We are still on the extreme left, due east of Atlanta. Be 
of good cheer, a good time is coming. We will soon be 
through." The warmth and glow in my heart that evening 
as I sat on my veranda and watched the western sun, was 
dulled by the arrival of a special messenger at Cory don, 
who informed me my husband had been desperately wound- 
ed at Atlanta, and for me to meet him at Nashville. After 
a sleepless night I started early the next morning, driving 
to New Albany, thence by rail to Nashville. On reaching 
Nashville, as I went in at the front door of the Maxwell 
House, General McArthur, whom I had met at Vicksburg, 
leaned out of the window and said, "Mrs. Gresham, they 
are just carrying your husband in at the rear." 

I found him indeed desperately wounded. The division 
surgeon, Doctor Eastman of Wisconsin, was with him. 
Colonel Benjamin Q. A. Gresham, my brother-in-law, who 
commanded the Tenth Indiana Cavalry, stationed at some 
place in eastern Tennessee, was also there. When he 
heard of his brother's wound, he left his command, without 
leave, and w^ent to him. A universal favorite with a fine 
record, and an independence that was refreshing and ap- 
parently approved by his superiors, he was not even cen- 
sured for doing what ordinarily would have been punished 
by dismissal. The handsomest man I saw in uniform dur- 
ing the war, of powerful physique, he possessed that magi- 
cal control over men that made him a force and a leader 
in whatever company he was thrown. Many a man got 
credit for his work in the field while he did not get the 
promotion he deserved. He was almost universally spoken 



THE ATLANTA CAMPAIGN 303 

of and frequently addressed as "Colonel Ben." When the 
army was on the retreat, he was generally covering the 
rear; when it was advancing, he was in the lead. 

We remained that night in the Maxwell House. "Colo- 
nel Ben's" cheerfulness and good nature did much to allay 
the impatience and regret which my husband was feeling 
at having lost his place at the front. Older, larger in size, 
it was the big brother again. He said to my husband, 
"You are not the only fellow that was ever wounded. 
You are fortunate that you did not meet McPherson's fate. 
In advance of a skirmish line is no place for a division 
commander, let alone the commander of an army. You 
seem to think you could go through this war unscathed. 
I have been hit and must still take my chances." And he 
continued to take them until in the last days of December 
of that year in a skirmish, as he was leading the pursuit after 
the battle of Nashville, he received the wounds that caused 
his death. His talk was a good thing in that it diverted 
my husband's mind from the wound. One thing the Gen- 
eral said was: "Ben, you never did have any respect or 
consideration for anything or anybody." And then there 
was a hot discussion about generals and campaigns. 

And here I must tell a story which "Colonel Ben" after- 
wards told me of how he came to get his last wound. It 
relates to his superior officer, General J. H. Wilson, who 
commanded the Federal cavalry of General Thomas's army 
at Nashville, and it has a bearing on the delay on General 
Thomas's part at Nashville which made General Grant so 
impatient. 

After I reached camp at Nashville I went to General Wilson's 
headquarters in response to a summons from him. General Wilson 
said, "Colonel Gresham, be prepared to take the lead with your 
regiment by to-morrow. We may attack, or the enemy may 
retreat." I replied, "General Wilson, I have helped cover the 
rear from east Tennessee in. Mine was the last regiment into 
Franklin, the last out of Franklin, and the last into Nashville. 



304 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

My men are all right, but the regiment is practically dismounted. 
Our horses are worn out. Why not let some of these new regi- 
ments with fresh mounts take the lead?" "Consider yourself 
under arrest, sir," answered the general. Taking off my sword 
and throwing it down on the general's table, I replied: "This 
is unjust. My regiment has borne more service than any other 
cavalry regiment in the army, and I will make you prefer your 
charges." Then I went to my tent. Soon a staff officer came 
from General Wilson and asked me to overlook the incident, 
reconsider my determination, and take command of my regiment. 
Several times was the visit repeated, but each time I answered: 
"Tell General Wilson I refuse. I have been badly treated. I 
shall make him prefer his charges." Finally the staff officer came 
and said, "General Wilson presents his compliments to Colonel 
Gresham and requests him to select such horses from the new 
regiments as in his judgment may be necessary properly to mount 
his regiment, and be prepared to take the lead." I could not 
stand out against that. "Tell General Wilson I will obey his 
order." I took the best horses I could find in those several regi- 
ments and mounted my regiment as I thought it should be. 

General Thomas's delay in attacking Hood when Hood 
followed Thomas's army up to Nashville almost made 
General Grant frantic. General Wilson gives a graphic 
account of the reorganization of Thomas's army, especial- 
ly the cavalry after it reached Nashville. How much 
"Colonel Ben's" decision of character contributed to Gen- 
eral Thomas's defiance of General Grant's orders, there is 
no record of. Hood did not wait to be attacked, but led 
to it, was defeated, and we have General Wilson's report 
for it that "Colonel Ben" w^as in the lead in the pur- 
suit. Toward night, in a charge, "Colonel Ben" received 
the wound that would have ended most men's lives on the 
field, and which finally, after a number of years, most of 
them of suffering, ended his. 

Years afterwards, at a dinner party, I asked General 
J. H. Wilson if he knew my husband's brother, "Colonel 
Ben" Gresham. "Oh, yes," was his answer, "everybody 



THE ATLANTA CAMPAIGN 305 

knew 'Colonel Ben,' and the official records attest his 
gallantry." 

It was due to "Colonel Ben" that we were able to leave 
Nashville the next morning. The cot on which my husband 
was carried was too large to go through the doors of the 
cars in the train which had been made up. "Colonel 
Ben" had the train held until he procured another car with 
wider doors. In this car, which was attached to the rear 
of the train, the cot was placed on top of the backs of the 
car seats. Doctor Eastman and two or three soldiers and 
myself, as nurses, made up the other occupants of the car. 
"Colonel Ben," without any other leave than his own, went 
with us to Louisville. 

At the station in Louisville an ambulance and a crowd 
of curious people awaited us. My husband did not want 
the people to see him. I had covered his face with a hand- 
kerchief, and while we were waiting for the ambulance a 
woman came up, jerked the handkerchief off his face and 
asked, "Is he dead?" It was hoped we could get to New 
Albany that night, in order to avoid the pain incident to 
loading and unloading into the ambulance. We drove 
from the Louisville station to Portland to take the ferry 
boat to New Albany, but our progress was slow, as we 
could not go faster than a walk. Arrived at the foot of 
the levee at Portland at midnight, we saw the ferry boat 
stuck on a sand bar in the middle of the river, so we were 
forced to drive back up the levee to the Portland Hotel for 
the night. To avoid the crowds of curious people we made 
a very early start in the morning for New Albany. This 
time my husband was carried down to the levee and on the 
boat, as it was too painful for him to be driven down. 

There were hospitals at Louisville and New Albany, 
but the doctors said it would not do to take my husband to 
one of them because of the danger of gangrene, especially 
after he had lived in the field and in tents for three years. 
"Neither will he be able to stand the confinement of a 



3o6 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

house or hotel." So it was arranged to put up a tent in 
Mr. R. P. Mann's yard, and there we stayed a month. 

Doctor Eastman, after a few days in New Albany, 
turned him over to Doctor Sloane, who was in charge of 
the army hospitals there. We had no trained nurses in 
those days ; convalescents and soldiers that had gained some 
experience in the hospitals were detailed as such. We had 
one for the day and one at night, — a corporal and a ser- 
geant. With their assistance I nursed General Gresham 
for the first four months; my clothes were off only when I 
changed them. Doctor Sloane visited him every day, and 
there was not a more capable or competent man in his 
profession in that or any other day. The wound was pro- 
duced by a minie ball striking the main bone of the left 
lower limb. The bone was shattered for three inches. 
After some of the splinters were removed, the ends of the 
bone remaining in the leg, nearest together, were three- 
quarters of an inch apart. The opinion of the surgeons 
was that as he was young and vigorous, with absolutely 
pure blood, and had no bad habits, he had one chance in a 
hundred for the bone to grow and knit together. All the 
surgeons in the field but one. Doctor Eastman, were for 
amputation. One of the stories is that it was this doctor's 
opinion and my husband's revolver that prevented ampu- 
tation on the field. Doctor Eastman said, "You must 
take the risk, and save his leg," the risk being that he en- 
dangered his life in not having the Hmb amputated at once. 
When Doctor Eastman left me, he looked me in the eye, 
and said, "His life is in your hands." 

No sooner were we settled in New Albany than letters 
by the score came from officers inquiring as to his condi- 
tion and giving an account of the military situation. There 
were letters from Cyrus Hall, Colonels Potts, Belknap and 
Cadle, Captains Babbitt and Duncan of his staff, Frank P. 
Blair, Jr., the commander of the Seventeenth Army Corps, 
and scores of others. The best letters were from Duncan 



THE ATLANTA CAMPAIGN 



307 



and Babbitt and Frank P. Blair, Jr. My husband was 
shot by a sharpshooter late in the afternoon of July 20, 
while on or in advance of the picket line. At noon on that 
day two divisions of the Seventeenth Army Corps, the 
third under General Leggett and the fourth under General 
Gresham, left Decatur, northeast of Atlanta, and moved 
southwest toward Atlanta, with Gresham's division in the 
lead and pushing the enemy. My husband's story is that 
when nearing the works around Atlanta he had gone to the 
front with his glass and had satisfied himself that the Con- 
federate line in his immediate front was weak. He was on 
the point of ordering a charge with a view to boring into 
Atlanta when he was shot down.^ This is manifest from the 
letter of August 20 of his immediate superior, Frank P. 
Blair, Jr., who commanded the Seventeenth Army Corps. 
McPherson commanded the Army of the Tennessee, which 
was then composed of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Army 
Corps. Blair wrote: 

You have doubtless seen the papers' tiresome account of the 
terrible conflict we had on the 21st and 22d, the days succeeding 
your departure. The hill to the left of the position you occupied, 
and from which you received your wound, was so commanding 
that I found it necessary, having reconnoitered it immediately 
after you fell, to carry it by assault, and ordered up Leggett (the 
Third Division of the Seventeenth Army Corps) on your left for 
that purpose. Unfortunately he did not receive the order to 
attack it that evening, the staff officer I sent to him only telling 
him to form on your left and leaving out the most important 
part of the order, which was ' ' to assault immediately. ' ' This delay 
enabled the enemy to reinforce strongly that night, which they 
did, and fortified themselves to some extent. Nevertheless the 
hill was carried next morning early by Leggett's division, the 
Fourth Division [Gresham's], under General Giles A. Smith, 
attacking the hill in front at the same time in order to prevent 
the enemy from throwing his entire strength against Leggett's 
division. Both divisions lost heavily and about equally, in all 
about 730 men. Next morning I received infonnation that the 

I See page 310; also, "Cleburne and His Command," Irving G. Buck, page 271. 



3o8 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

enemy had retired within the fortifications of Atlanta, and going 
to the front I found they had abandoned a Hne of works they had 
thrown up the night previous and which were within 1,200 yards 
of their main works. McPherson, Giles Smith, Leggett, and I 
were all out upon this line of the enemy's abandoned works and 
it was decided to reverse them and occupy them. Dodge was 
ordered to occupy a position on my left. Returning to my camp 
(which was on the road on which the enemy first opened on us the 
day you were wounded and where one of their shells cut your 
horse's mane), I found that road occupied by Dodge's troops, and 
turning off at right angles near the house where you formed the 
Iowa Brigade and the head of the column reaching near the spot 
where I saw you and talked to you after you had been wounded, 
the enemy attacked us in front flank and rear. 

McPherson was killed in attempting to reach my front by 
passing on a road cut through the heavy timber, directly in front 
of where I saw you after you were wounded. 

The enemy drove in our pickets and skirmishers and followed 
them up with their line of battle, but they could not manage to 
connect their attacks from front and rear at the same moment. 
As they came first from the rear, our boys took the opposite side 
of their works and drove them back with great slaughter, following 
them up with skirmish line to hold them as long as possible and 
give us time to meet the attack from the other quarters. Giles 
Smith then formed the Fourth Division at right angles facing 
south with his works, and drove back an attack from the direction 
of Atlanta; the boys jumped over their works, faced about, and 
sent them back in a hurry. By this time the line which attacked 
our rear had rallied and reinforced, and came up with a yell. The 
men were again formed in the reverse or Atlanta side of their 
works and met this charge with the same courage and address as 
the others. The fighting was most desperate, the enemy coming 
up to the breastworks and fighting with the bayonet and sword 
in hand-to-hand encounter. Colonel Belknap, of the Fifteenth 
Iowa, took prisoner the colonel of the Forty-fifth Alabama, by 
taking hold of his coat collar and pulling him over the breastworks. 
Many other equally daring acts were performed. Finally the 
enemy were compelled to retire after having suffered terribly. 
This sort of fighting continued for five mortal hours, both divisions 



THE ATLANTA CAMPAIGN 309 

repulsing in the handsomest manner every assault made upon 
them, until finalh^ at about 6 o'clock the enemy commenced an 
attack on the Fourth Division simultaneously from front, flank, 
and rear with musketry and artillery, and compelled General 
Smith to abandon his position and draw out with Leggett a line 
running nearlv east from the top of the high hill captured by 
Leggett on the 21st,- facing to the south and extending in the 
direction of Dodge, but not reaching his line by at least half a 
mile. Here the enemy made his last and most desperate assault, 
with fresh troops. The object appeared to be to drive us from the 
hill so often referred to, which commanded not only the position 
of the Seventeenth but that also of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth 
Army Corps. The fight here continued until long after dark, 
and until nothing could be seen but the flash of the guns from the 
opposite side of the same works which covered the crest of the 
hill. The enemy planted their flags side by side with ours and 
fought with unparalleled desperation and fury, but after night 
set in their fire became languid and feeble; they only held the 
ground until just before daylight in order to carry off their 
wounded. The morning rose on such a scene as my eyes never 
before looked upon. The ground was literally carpeted with their 
dead. 

It is certain that we killed over 2,000 of them and wounded 
and captured enough of them to equal the entire force which the 
Seventeenth Army Corps took into the fight, about 8,000 men. 
This would appear almost preposterous, but when the closeness 
and desperate character of the fighting is considered, the actual 
number of their killed on part of the field which we control and 
upon the balance of the field, seen and estimated by men like 
Smith and Potts, accustomed to these bloody scenes and by 
no means disposed to exaggerate, as you are well aware, then 
the matter assumes quite a different aspect. 

The troops that fought our corps were Cleburne and Cheat- 
ham's divisions, the troops under Brigadier-General Maney of 
Hardee's corps on our flank and rear; the other two divisions of 
Walker and Bates attacking Dodge, and a part of Hood's old 
corps under Cheatham from the direction of Atlanta; a part 
of this corps also attacked the Fifteenth on our right. Our loss 
was 1,801 killed, wounded, and missing, and on the day before, 



3IO LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

as I have already stated, about 750. We captured about seven 
stand of colors and about 1,000 muskets. 

This letter has been spun out to an enormous length, but you 
asked me to write, and I knew that you would be glad to hear 
of the achievements of your old command; and I have considered 
that as you are laid up with your leg, I would make' "a night of 
it with you." Not such a night as we have had sometimes in 
camp, but the best we could do under the circumstances and at 
such a distance. So here's to you! 

You will have heard before this that Belknap has been ap- 
pointed a brigadier-general. Potts has been recommended and 
deserves promotion as much as any living man. Don't you wish 

you were here in camp? 

Your friend, 

Frank P. Blair, Jr. 

A Confederate who was all through the Atlanta cam- 
paign, serving in the Breckenridge Division, to whom I 
showed General Blair's letter, expressed the opinion that 
the estimate General Blair put on the Confederate casual- 
ties was too high. Perhaps so, but it only purports to be 
an estimate on General Blair's part. 

After my husband voted for Grover Cleveland all kinds 
of imputations were put upon his motives, and among the 
criticisms visited on him was that he had no business as a 
division commander at the time he w^as wounded, to be so 
far to the front. If it was a just criticism, it applied to 
some men in rank higher than he. General Sherman was 
never one of these critics. On the contrary, Walter Q. 
Gresham, McPherson, Blair, and others were where General 
Sherman wanted them to be. When we lived in Washing- 
ton during Mr. Arthur's administration, and within a block 
of General Sherman's residence, I heard General Sherman 
say that "if Gresham had not been wounded when he was, 
he would have been in Atlanta the next day." Army corps 
and division commanders, at General Sherman's instance, 
went farther to the front than was the case in most, if not 
all, other armies. This was because many of the colonels 



THE ATLANTA CAMPAIGN 311 

and the brigade commanders, in accordance with General 
Sherman's views, did not wish or would not force their men 
into the ravines through which the army was being pressed 
to invest Atlanta. Captain F. Y. Hedley, Assistant Adju- 
tant-General of the Second Brigade of the Fourth Division 
of the Seventeenth Army Corps, was one of the babies of 
the army, only seventeen, and so undersized when he en- 
listed in the Thirty-second Illinois at Springfield in 1861 
that he could get in only by enrolling as a musician-to-be. 
A few days later, according to a previous understanding 
with Colonel Logan, he was reduced to the ranks so he could 
carry a gun. He was but twenty when he re-enlisted as a 
veteran in January, 1864, and was known to every man in 
the Army of the Tennessee. After the war Captain Hed- 
ley said, "General Gresham was more indebted to Colonel 
John Logan of the Thirty-second Illinois, a cousin of Gen- 
eral Logan, than to any other man. Colonel Logan," said 
the captain, "would not 'go in' with his regiment at a 
certain time when General Gresham wanted him to do so. 
Had Logan done so his regiment would have been cut 
to pieces and Gresham would have lost his command. 
This was the difference between Grant and Sherman as 
commanders of an army." 

In a letter written from the field. Doctor Edgar, who 
wanted to amputate the leg, said: "If you could have 
been with us a few more days you would have won another 
star." Captain Babbitt, now a colonel, expressed his 
sympathy for "the man who was born to command and 
lead, but consigned to nursing a wounded leg." From 
Big Shanty, Georgia, November i, 1864, he wrote, "Hood 
won't stand up and fight. We have chased him all over 
northern Georgia and cannot get a fight out of him." 
He seemed to know everything that was going on in the 
army. "Belknap is in command of the Fourth Divis- 
ion now, but he bears his honors awkwardly." Then, 
soldierlike, he critisized orders from his superiors, from 



312 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

General Sherman down to Potts, his brigade commander. 

When the rainy season came on, we moved from Mr. 
Mann's yard to the residence of Mr. Charles Sackett, on 
First Street, and then across the street from him to a house 
we had secured. 

After about ten months the wound looked so bad that 
we called in army surgeons, about a dozen from the hos- 
pitals around the "Falls," that is, from the hospitals in 
Jeffersonville, New Albany, and Louisville. They held a 
consultation and then said the amputation must take 
place at once; that it was the only chance of saving the 
patient's life. Doctor Sloane, our surgeon, who was also 
on the staff of one of the hospitals and had been with us 
from the start, sat by and listened. My husband turned 
to him and asked: "What do you say. Doctor?" The 
doctor answered, "I do not agree with the gentlemen." 
My husband said, "Will you not amputate?" "No," said 
Doctor Sloane, "I will not." My husband said, "If you 
do not, no one else can touch that leg." This ended the 
consultation. 

Doctor Sloane afterwards said to me, "They might as 
well have cut his head off as to have amputated at that 
time, for all the chance he would then have had to live, 
depleted as he was by the long confinement and the sup- 
puration on the wound." In a letter from his Wisconsin 
home. Doctor Eastman confirmed Doctor Sloane's opinion. 
Several months before. Doctor Eastman had called on us 
as he was returning from the front. 

It was a year in bed, most of the time on the flat of the 
back, three months more before he was on crutches, and 
five years before he could dispense with those crutches. 
General Gresham's mind was never more active than during 
the fifteen months' confinement. He watched the progress 
of public affairs with the keenest scrutiny. That I could 
not help absorbing much of these matters can possibly be 
understood. 



CHAPTER XIX 
NEGRO SUFFRAGE 



COLONEL GRESHAM's MANY VISITORS THIRTEENTH 

AMENDMENT SUBMITTED TO STATES FOR RATIFICATION 

ELIMINATE SLAVERY WITHOUT COMPENSATION LINCOLN 

RECONSTRUCTS LOUISIANA SUMNER OPPOSES RECOGNITION 

OF LOUISIANA STATE GOVERNMENT SOLDIERS OPPOSED TO 

NEGRO SUFFRAGE SHERMAN's OPPOSITION LINCOLN'S 

ASSASSINATION GRESHAM FOR COMPLETE AMNESTY THE 

FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT TO THE CONSTITUTION SOLDIER 

VOTE RATIFIES IT GRESHAM A SOLDIER ORATOR CANDI- 
DATE FOR CONGRESS MORTON AND GRESHAM OPPOSE 

NEGRO SUFFRAGE GRESHAM DEFEATED FOR CONGRESS BUT 

ELECTED STATE AGENT — MORTON ELECTED TO SENATE 
— MORTON VOTES TO INCORPORATE NEGRO SUFFRAGE INTO 
RECONSTRUCTION ACTS. 



L 



OUISVILLE was an important stop-over or transfer- 
ring point for soldiers coming and going to the front. 
At Louisville, Jeffersonville, and New Albany there were 
camps and hospitals. In addition to letters which came 
telHng of the movements of Sherman's army, the March 
to the Sea and up through the Carolinas, we had visit- 
ors by the hundreds — officers, private soldiers, and army 
surgeons. The latter were especially interested in General 
Gresham's wound. 

Many of the visitors had themselves lost an arm or a leg. 
Some with wooden legs were on the way back to the front 
and were objects of envy. One big strapping fellow came 
in one day with a large red apple for the invalid, and said : 
"Colonel, I am the man you made march all day tied up 



313 



314 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

to a wagon. I was sore at you for a long time, but it is 
all over now." Then the conversation went on for the 
balance of the day about the different regiments, brigades, 
divisions, officers, and men, and that unratified Thirteenth 
Amendment. 

Among the private soldiers who visited us were Dixon 
and Matthew Pennington, born and reared on the "Under- 
ground Railroad." A youth of twenty in 1864, Dick was 
a veteran of three years' service, and suffering from his 
third and last wound, a shot through the left knee, which 
had incapacitated him. A veteran at eighteen, laughed 
at because he was still undersized, this story was told 
of Matt. In a hand-to-hand contest, a Rebel captain, 
when Matt leveled his musket at him and called on him 
to surrender, replied, "I'll be damned before I surrender 
to a mere boy!" After it was all over, the officer to 
whom the Rebel surrendered was greatly relieved and 
said to him, "I was afraid the little devil would kill 
you," at which Matt said, with an oath, "I would have 
done so, but my gun was n't loaded and I did n't have no 
ammunition." 

Captain Babbitt, now a colonel, came to visit us after 
the surrender. Bright, as he always was, his cough had 
increased. He did not long survive. Captain Norton, 
with his bright red hair and handsome face, came on his 
way home to Wisconsin. He was also a most welcome 
visitor. He had gone on the March to the Sea, up through 
the Carolinas, down the Avenue, and back to Natchez to 
see Miss Nannie Stanton, but in the meantime another 
Yankee officer had won the prize. Never wounded, but 
on the go day and night as a staff officer, Norton drew on 
his reserve force and did not long survive. Captain — now 
Colonel — Duncan, after the surrender, also spent many 
days with us. 

Among our visitors after the surrender was Colonel 
N. H. Owings, who had only attained his majority when 



NEGRO SUFFRAGE 315 

he enlisted in 1861. He called everybody except General 
Sherman by his first name, and was universally addressed 
and spoken of as "Nick" Owings. Smart as a steel trap, he 
had been a clerk in the Indiana Republican State Central 
Committee during the campaign of i860, and while a clerk 
in the Indiana legislature of 1861 he became acquainted 
with and was always a devoted friend of General Gresham. 
From a clerical position in Washington he enlisted in one 
of the United States volunteer regiments. During the 
Atlanta campaign, the March to the Sea, and up through 
the Carolinas, Colonel Owings served part of the time on 
General Sherman's staff. Some of the stories "Nick" told 
of the freedom with which General Sherman criticized men 
and measures, were entertaining. One will illustrate the 
workings of General Sherman's mind and the character of 
Colonel Owings. General Sherman was always opposed 
to political brigadiers. Any man who secured promotion 
without his knowledge or consent was immediately or- 
dered off to Washington as being unfit to associate with 
soldiers. A member of General Sherman's staff, a brother- 
in-law, was Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Ewing. "Charlie 
Ewing," as Nick called him, "was dying to have a brig- 
adier-general's commission. We could get one through 
Senator Sherman ^ but the minute the commission came 
under such circumstances, we feared the General would 
fire Charlie off to Washington, so we fixed up a scheme to 
get General Sherman's endorsement. One day after dinner 
and a good stiff toddy, while Wilham Tecumseh was sign- 
ing a lot of orders and papers, his signature went on the 
recommendation to the Secretary of War to make Charlie 
Ewing a brigadier-general." In due time the commission 
came and General Sherman was furious. "Go off to Wash- 
ington! A lieutenant is good enough for me," is the way 
"Nick" says General Sherman greeted CharHe's promotion. 
"In his rage, none of us dared tell the General how the 

1 John Sherman, brother of General Sherman; see pages 497. S67, 59^ and 632. 



3i6 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

trick had been turned. But we made Charlie a brigadier, 
even if we ended his career in the field." 

As a story-teller Colonel Owings was one of the best, 
and his laugh was infectious. His visit did the invalid a 
world of good. With Colonel Owings all was fair in war 
and politics. He was a figure in the national conventions. 
He made and lost several fortunes, one in Colorado, an- 
other in the territory and State of Washington, where he 
died a well-to-do man. His wife was a member of the 
Board of Lady Managers of the World's Columbian Ex- 
position at Chicago in 1892 and 1893. 

After the General was out of the hospital, "Colonel Ben" 
Gresham came, so bright and cheerful that no one would 
suspect he was suffering from a mortal wound. There 
came also Cyrus Hall, the precocious Hedley, still a boy in 
years, and too many Illinois men to mention. I remember 
General Potts of Ohio, whom Babbitt hated so cordially. 
It was Rawlins morning, noon, and night. I heard more 
of John A. Rawlins, General Grant's adjutant-general, 
than of General Grant himself and all the balance of them 
put together. 

Many of our soldier callers were lawyers, some of whom 
were afterwards eminent in their profession. Colonel 
Conrad Baker of one of the Indiana regiments, then pro- 
vost-marshal with headquarters at Indianapolis, was one 
such. He was one of our dearest friends. In September, 
1864, Colonel Baker became the Union or Republican 
candidate for lieutenant-governor of Indiana on the ticket 
on which Governor Oliver P. Morton was the candidate for 
re-election. Governor Morton campaigned in our neigh- 
borhood but never came to see us. He was not then ad- 
vocating universal negro suffrage. But he was preparing 
— as he did — to displace Henry S. Lane, our United States 
senator. Mr. Lane made several visits to New Albany for 
the sole purpose of visiting us. I shall always appreciate 
his kindness and sympathy. He sent my husband the 



NEGRO SUFFRAGE ~ 317 

Congressional Globe, so we were in touch with all questions 
which had grown out of the rebellion. Besides, we had 
the Louisville, Indianapolis, and New York papers. 

One of my husband's regrets was that he could not go 
to the polls to vote for Mr. Lincoln. Among our callers 
was General Cravens, our congressman, a veteran of the 
Mexican War. Although he had voted against the sub- 
mission of the Thirteenth Amendment he was regarded as 
a war Democrat, and had been defeated for nomination 
by Michael C. Kerr. Still, General Cravens was cam- 
paigning for McClellan. Of his own volition he had 
espoused my husband's side against Governor Morton, and 
had protested to President Lincoln against the Gover- 
nor's efforts to have Colonel Gresham dismissed from 
the service. General Cravens returned to my husband 
the letter of thanks Mr. Gresham had written to him, 
which was a statement of the Gresham side and Mr. 
Gresham's opinion of the Governor. This letter was de- 
livered into my keeping, and was preserved with the other 
original Morton papers until loaned to a veteran, who, to 
my astonishment, destroyed them because he said old 
sores should not be re-opened. Many would-be historians 
share this veteran's views. I, however, entertain a dif- 
ferent opinion. 

Not all the soldiers — for many were Democrats and 
drafted men — were for Mr. Lincoln's re-election, but the 
volunteer was almost universally for "Old Abe." The 
Democrats had a strong ticket, headed .by Joseph E. 
MacDonald for governor, and for lieutenant-governor Gen- 
eral Mahlon D. Manson, a popular man, a good stumper, 
who had gone out as Colonel of the Tenth Indiana and 
won his star in the field. In Kentucky, men like John M. 
Harlan had supported the Union cause in 1861, and not 
only were making speeches for McClellan but had time to 
come to Indiana and make the strongest and most effective 
speeches against Mr. Lincoln. As Colonel of the Tenth 
21 



3i8 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

Kentucky Volunteers, John M. Harlan was one of the first 
of the Kentuckians to enlist. He served long and well, 
but decHned a brigadier's commission to go home and take 
care of his father's estate. There were many Kentuckians 
like him, who having finished their three years' service 
did not re-enUst. Of the eighteen Kentucky regiments 
still in the field a large proportion — some said two-thirds 
— voted for McClellan, who carried Kentucky by a large 
majority. It was the "nigger question." Slavery was still 
lawful in Kentucky, but business conditions were chaotic. 
My friends the Harneys were in financial distress, but were 
still holding on to their slaves and their newspaper. It 
was full of accounts of slaves and of litigation about negroes. 
Following Mr. Lincoln's election and Sherman's March 
to the Sea, the resolution to amend the Constitution — 
the Thirteenth Amendment — which had been pending 
since December i6, 1863, and had failed by the necessary 
two-thirds to pass the House, was again brought forward. 
As Senator Hendricks had feared, and as my husband had 
predicted to the veterans when he was urging them to re- 
enlist, congressmen who had voted against it changed front 
or ducked, and on February i, 1865, the Thirteenth Amend- 
ment was submitted to the States for ratification, but with 
our war congressman recorded against it. February 13 
the Indiana legislature ratified it, while ten days later the 
Kentucky legislature almost unanimously rejected it. The 
Kentuckians were insisting on compensation before they 
gave up their slaves, and I think some method should have 
been devised, as might have been done, to take care of them 
because of the loyalty they showed in 1861 under the pledge 
the National government then made that it would not 
abolish slavery. Benjamin H. Bristow was one of the few 
Kentucky legislators who voted to ratify the Thirteenth 
Amendment. He was a slaveholder and came from an 
old Kentucky family of slaveholders at the time he cast 
that vote. A wound had taken him out of the field where 



NEGRO SUFFRAGE 319 

he and Walter Q. Gresham formed a friendship that never 
abated. 

But as the war progressed, pubHc opinion changed the 
viewpoint of those soldiers who visited us after July 20, 
1864. Every vestige of African slavery must be eliminated 
from the Federal Constitution and that, too, without com- 
pensation. Babbitt voiced the universal sentiment : "The 
time was when we wanted to pay them for their niggers, 
but they would not take it. After all the money that has 
been spent and the bloodshed, and the negro practically 
free, I am opposed to giving them a dollar." 

In a limited way, to those blacks who had been good 
soldiers and were educated and intelligent, the suffrage 
should be extended. The soldier emphasized the fact that 
this was Mr. Lincoln's idea. I heard expressions like 
these: "Charles Sumner and Thad Stevens will never be 
able with the freedmen to rule the men it has taken us 
nearly four years on the battlefield to put down." "Give 
the negro the ballot, and you will give the Rebel soldier 
two votes to the Union soldier's one." Over and over 
again I heard that last speech of Mr. Lincoln's referred to, 
as to how he would have reconstructed. 

The case of Lieutenant John R. Piquet, who came to 
us after the surrender, is most illuminating. In New 
Albany there was a family of light mulattoes whose history 
went back to territorial days. The prejudice against the 
negro barber had not then arisen. As one of the Carters 
was cutting Colonel Gresham's hair he sent a message to 
Piquet in a way that excited my husband's curiosity. 
With his facility to cross-examine. Colonel Gresham 
learned before he left the barber shop that Piquet's mother 
was one of those "high yellow women." After his return 
to the front, my husband sent for Piquet and delivered 
Carter's message. It flashed over Piquet that his secret 
was known. He trembled and said, "Colonel, these sol- 
diers won't let me stay in the ranks with them. They will 



320 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

shoot me the minute they know I am a nigger." "They 
will never know it unless you tell them," was the response. 
Promotion came. In a short time after the close of our 
war Piquet lost his life in the Juarez insurrection in Mexico. 
With his amnesty proclamation of December 8, 1863, 
as a guide, Mr. Lincoln, by the time Congress met in De- 
cember, 1864, had reconstructed Louisiana to the extent 
of organizing a State government, adopting a free consti- 
tution with suffrage Hmited to those who were qualified to 
vote in i860, and had elected two United States senators. 
From his sickbed Walter Q. Gresham wrote to men in 
northern Louisiana who applied to him for advice to go 
in with Mr. Lincoln: "Get back any way you can — 
only get back." John M. Harlan was still opposing Mr. 
Lincoln's plan of reconstruction. In his speech at New 
Albany, October 4, 1864, he said: 

He holds and exercises the power to subvert State governments 
and he even prescribes the terms upon which people may vote. 
A loyal man in Alabama, who has been true to his country 
and has been a soldier in the War of 181 2 and the Mexican War, 
could not vote in re-establishing civil authority in that State unless 
he would first take Lincoln's oath to become an Abolitionist. 
The triumph of Abolition would be the triumph of a spirit, which 
in order to effect its purpose would not hesitate to trample with 
impugnity upon constitutions and laws. There is no safety in 
this land of ours except in rigid adherence to law — no safety for 
life, liberty, or property. 

Although a majority in the Senate were for recognizing 
Mr. Lincoln's Louisiana State government and admitting 
her two United States senators, Charles Sumner, with 
the aid of the Democratic senators — with very few ex- 
ceptions, — was able to cause so much delay, that March 
5, 1865, came and the session ended with Louisiana still 
"out." Sumner's objection was that Lincoln's Louis- 
iana State constitution did not provide for unrestricted 
negro suffrage, while the Democratic senators, like Thomas 



NEGRO SUFFRAGE 321 

A. Hendricks, predicated their opposition on the fact that 
out of the 40,000 voters in Louisiana in i860 only 11,000 
in 1865 had voted to ratify the new constitution. 

Had Mr. Lincoln lived — with the soldiers behind him, 
as they were, almost to a man — the radicals in Congress 
would not have ruled. Men like Benjamin H. Bristow 
and John M. Harlan, who were always Union men and 
who went over to the radicals, would have been glad to 
stop at Mr. Lincoln's conservatism. I know whereof I 
write, for I have talked with them, and afterwards I said 
to both Bristow and Harlan: "It was a mistake. I told 
you so." On political lines General Grant would have 
followed Mr. Lincoln. It was John A. Rawlins who swung 
General Grant over to unrestricted enfranchisement.^ My 
husband's intimacy with Rawlins enabled him to learn 
early what was coming. 

Ida Tarbell, in her life of Lincoln, tells a story, or 
at least part of a story, the whole of which is conclusive 
that if Mr. Lincoln had lived, General Grant would have 
been one of his staunchest supporters. 

Miss Tarbell says that J. Russell Jones told her that 
he — Mr. Jones — had a letter from General Grant, written 
from Chattanooga in the Fall of 1863, in response to a letter 
from Mr. Jones to General Grant enclosing a clipping from 
the New York Herald suggesting General Grant for Presi- 
dent. In this letter. Grant stated that he was for Lincoln 
and his policies to the end, and would not even permit his 
name to be mentioned as a candidate against Mr. Lincoln. 
This letter, Mr. Jones stated a number of times in my 
husband's and my presence at the dinner table, he delivered 
to Mr. Lincoln in the White House in response to an inti- 
mation from Mr. Lincoln that he would like to know where 
Grant stood with reference to his, Lincoln's, reelection. 

"You, Jones," said Lincoln, "know more about General 
Grant's attitude than anybody else."- "Thereupon," said 

1 See page 464. 2 See page 344. 



322 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

Mr. Jones, "I pulled out of my pocket the letter that 
General Grant had written me, which had accidentally 
remained in my pocket after its receipt. I had no idea 
what Mr. Lincoln wanted with me when he sent for me to 
come to Washington." 1 Standing, Mr. Lincoln read the 
letter very carefully, reached down, as he had to, Mr. 
Jones being a very small man, and placing a hand on each 
of Mr. Jones's shoulders, said what Miss Tarbell does not 
publish, "Young feller, you'll never know how much good 
this does me!" Miss Tarbell would create the impression 
that Lincoln was indifferent to a renomination. 

The feeling of relief that followed Lee's surrender was 
deadened by the shock of the assassination of President 
Lincoln. The grief of every household was manifested by 
swinging black bunting from the front windows. Had Jef- 
ferson Davis been a big man, he would have surrendered 
with General Lee and then used his influence, as did the 
commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, to help heal 
the nation's wounds. A soldier, a gentleman, and a man 
not afraid to die would not have hesitated at the pains and 
penalties of the Confiscation Acts. However this may be, 
surrender might have saved Lincoln's assassination. It 
would certainly have done away with the belief that Davis 
was a party to it, and with the circulation broadcast through- 
out the North of the pictures that showed the late President 
of the Confederate States in a woman's garb when captured. 
I am relating the talk and behefs of the times. 

And there was General Sherman, the most magnanimous 
man in the North. The terms he granted General Johnston 
when the latter surrendered — terms that Thaddeus Stevens 
and Secretary Stanton refused to approve, terms that it is 
claimed even Mr. Lincoln would not have approved,^ 
ought to make the Southern people revise their estimate of 
General Sherman. He proposed the recognition of the exist- 
ing State or Rebel governments. Time and acquiescence 
on the part of the Republicans in the disfranchisement 

1 See pages 139 and 140, 



NEGRO SUFFRAGE 323 

of the negroes have vindicated his judgment. And yet 
the vSouthern people do not understand General Sher- 
man. The "Daughters" almost have spasms at the men- 
tion of his name. 

Resentful then, never did General Sherman "get back 
on the reservation ' ' ; that is, acquiesce in the Republican 
party's plan of reconstruction, as was shown when General 
Grant was a candidate for President the first time.^ 

At this time, we were perhaps in closer touch with con- 
ditions in Mississippi than with any other part of the Union. 
The correspondence with officers, sutlers, and citizens of 
Natchez was voluminous. Colonel Kent, who fought the 
cotton thieves in both armies and had begged to go in the 
Atlanta campaign, William Coleman, a sutler, and Win- 
throp Sargent of the old regime, were regular correspond- 
ents. Conditions were deplorable. 

May 4, 1865, Lieutenant-General Richard Taylor, a son 
of President Zachary Taylor, who had been so severe on 
the Secessionists in 1850, surrendered the last Confederate 
army at Meridian, Mississippi. On May 10, President 
Johnson proclaimed the end of all armed resistance and 
that he would follow Mr. Lincoln's policy of reconstruction 
without convening Congress. May 8, 1865, Governor Clark 
of Mississippi called the legislature of that State to meet at 
Jackson, June 8, 1865, and sent a commission to Washing- 
ton to assure the President of the desire of Mississippi to 
be restored to the Union. Governor Clark also issued a 
proclamation calling on the people of Mississippi to accept 
the results of the war in good faith. Governor, or rather 
General Clark, was a one-legged Confederate who, when no 
longer fitted for the field, had been, in 1863, elected Gover- 
nor of Mississippi. His government for the two years prior 
to the surrender had been in the saddle. After the surrender 
it had at least the form and substance of civil government. 
Walter Q. Gresham would have taken General Clark at his 
word. He would have dealt with the men in the field rather 

1 See pages 344-5. 



324 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

than with those who remained at home. The real fighting 
men would not have been long in getting together. But they 
were not then in control. The cordiality that Grant and 
Lee and Sherman and Johnston manifested extended to the 
ranks. My husband made the first real amnesty speech 
that was delivered at a soldiers' reunion.^ It was so heartily 
received that he repeated it until, with General Sherman's 
approval, it went into the records of the Society of the 
Army of the Tennessee. 

No such sentiments at first animated President Joh«ison. 
He proposed to make treason odious. He refused to permit 
the Mississippi legislature to meet and rejected General, 
or Governor, Clark's overtures. Mr. Lincoln, I believe, 
would have accepted them. President Johnson ordered 
the Mississippi legislature dissolved and Governor Clark 
removed from the State capitol at Jackson. 

May 29, 1865, President Johnson issued his Amnesty 
Proclamation as supplemental to that of Mr. Lincoln of 
December 8, 1863. It did not extend perfect amnesty to all. 

As illustrating the internal conditions, and Walter Q. 
Gresham's disposition to make it easy for the Southern 
men to get back to the old relations, I quote the corre- 
spondence with Frank Surget, who was rated by many 
as one of the "last ditch" men in Natchez until years 
afterwards, when after his death I produced the originals 



1 "The hardships and sufferings of our soldiers for the four long years of bloody war have 
been in vain if we shall fail to establish peace and concord between the different sections of our 
wide-spread country. We fought not for the vain purpose of displaying our prowess in the 
field, not to gratify feelings of sectional hatred or resentment, but to maintain inviolate the 
bonds of our Union and free institutions. Our enemies, alike with ourselves, were the de- 
scendants of the same common stock — our countrymen, many of them our kindred, inherit- 
ing the same traditions, and owing allegiance to the same Constitution and laws. The conflict 
of arms being ended, and the palm of victory ours, it 'is our first duty, as brave and mag- 
nanimous soldiers, to make our late enemies feel, by the liberality of our sentiments and the 
frankness of our conduct, that their return to their allegiance involves neither dishonor nor 
humiliation; that the passions engendered by the conflict have been banished from our 
breasts, and that hereafter we will regard as common enemies those who attempt to fan 
the flames of sectional strife. 

"Let it not hereafter be written of the soldiers of the Union and especially of the glorious 
Army of the Tennessee, that they knew how to meet the enemy in the field, but were not able 
to be magnanimous to a fallen foe." 



NEGRO SUFFRAGE 325 

in Natchez. One of Mr. Surget's brothers surrendered as 
a member of General Taylor's staff. 

General W. Q. Gresham, Natchez, July 18, 1865. 

Dear Sir: — 
I saw Norton [one of Mr. Gresham's staff while he was at 
Natchez] here about ten days ago. He informed me you were 
at New Albany. I have a favor or two to ask of you which you 
will oblige me by doing. I think it better for me to send an appli- 
cation to the President for a pardon. It is hardly necessary, I 
think, for me to do so, yet I had better be on the safe side, having 
several stiits to bring, and I may be accused under the 13th article 
in the President's last Proclamation for having given a few hundred 
dollars to the Confederates. You know this was not an entirely 
voluntary matter, as I had to give something in order to prevent 
them from destroying the only place I had left, with 500 bales 
near Woodville. You also know that I would have taken the oath 
at the time Davis did, but that as soon as it was known outside 
that I had done so, all of that property would have gone up. I 
told you at that time that such was my reason for not taking the 
oath and it was satisfactory to you. Davis's property was all 
within your lines or near them. . . . 

Please write me two separate notes, as the subjects are differ- 
ent, and forward them to me as soon as possible. 

Yours very respectfully, 

Frank Surget. 

The following letter was written in bed and, at my 
husband's request, I saw that it was put in the postoffice. 
It went into the files of the War Department and helped 
Frank Surget get his pardon. The last paragraph indicates 
the corruption of the times. If, in his desire to help his 
friend, Walter Q. Gresham overstated a Httle Mr. Surget's 
loyalty, I hope at this late date the " Reb" will not lay it up 
against Frank Surget's memory nor the "Yankee" against 
Walter Q. Gresham. To help a man rated as a Rebel 
took courage, and rendered the man who wrote such a 
letter, to some extent, an object of suspicion. But to 
every appeal my husband readily responded. 



326 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

New Albany, Ind., 

July 26, 1865. 
Hon. Andrew Johnson, 

President of the United States. 

Sir: — From about the ist of September, 1863, to about the ist 
of February, 1864, I was in command at the Post or District of 
Natchez, Mississippi, during all of which time F. Surget, Esq., a 
citizen of said place, quietly remained within the Federal lines, 
conducting himself with the strictest propriety. I became well 
acquainted with him, and believe him to be an honest man and 
a gentleman. 

He never was connected with the Confederate government, 
either in a civil or military capacity, and I have more than once 
heard him express himself as being opposed to secession and as 
having no confidence in the success of the rebellion. 

During the time above mentioned he told me how he was 
situated — that he had already lost a great deal of property, and 
that he had one or more plantations outside our lines on which 
were 500 or more bales of cotton, which would all be destroyed if 
he took the oath then required by President Lincoln. I thought, 
under the circumstances, he did right and so told him, believing 
that he would soon have an opportunity to take the oath and save 
his property. I believe him to be a good, loyal man, and therefore 
earnestly recommend that if he falls within any of the exceptions 
in your late Proclamation a pardon be granted him. 

I desire to state, in conclusion, that I have no pecuniary 
interest whatever in having Mr. Surget pardoned, and that I do 
not expect to be profited, either directly or indirectly, for making 
this recommendation. 

I am, Sir, Very respectfully, 

Your obdt. Svt., 

W. Q. Gresham, Brig.-Genl. 

Perhaps it was expecting too much, or it may have been 
due to want of tact on President Johnson's part — he could 
not have fared worse if he had accepted General Clark's 
offer, — but the fact is that the Mississippi Convention 
which President Johnson assembled in August, 1865, re- 
fused to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment or abolish slavery. 



NEGRO SUFFRAGE 



327 



Instead, some of the members talked of going to Kentucky 
and Maryland and purchasing negroes. Others said, before 
they would ratify or abolish slavery by their State consti- 
tution they should be paid for their negroes who had been 
freed by the Emancipation Proclamation, which did not ap- 
ply to Kentucky and Maryland. The Thirteenth Amend- 
ment was still without the sanction of the requisite number 
of States, so slavery still existed in Kentucky and also in 
Maryland. In vain they were reminded: "We have cer- 
tainly affirmatively and directly sworn to support the 
proclamation of the President and the laws of Congress 
with reference to emancipation." They were also asked: 
"Does any man suppose that those who, regardless of the 
offer of amnesty, refused to accept payment when ten- 
dered, will meet with favor in preferring a claim to com- 
pensation?" Generals Sherman, Blair, Logan, and Cox 
asked only that the States forever abolish slavery, leav- 
ing to each State the regulation of citizenship. "Let the 
existing state of things in our midst be kept up a few 
years and we shall witness, I fear, the enfranchisement 
of the negro." 

The Mississippi legislature that met October 2, 1865, 
not only rejected the Thirteenth Amendment but refused 
in the face of the recommendations of Governor B. G. Hum- 
phries — another gallant Confederate soldier, — to admit 
negroes to testify in court. Instead, it passed what was 
called the "Black Code," designed to nullify the effect of 
the Thirteenth Amendment if adopted. 

The Thirteenth Amendment imposed no restraint on 
the States; it did not even make the freedman a citizen 
to the extent he could sue in the courts. It only abol- 
ished "chattel slavery." On this exposition of it by 
Secretary of State Seward, South Carolina in November, 
1865, ratified it and then proceeded to pass the "Black 
Code," designed to reduce the freedmen to a state of serf- 
dom or peonage. Alabama and Florida soon followed South 



328 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

Carolina in ratification, and on December i8, 1865, Sec- 
retary Seward announced the Thirteenth Amendment rati- 
fied by the requisite number of States. 

Aside from the negro, we needed a Fourteenth Amend- 
ment. One of the defects of the old Constitution was that 
it did not define citizenship in our dual system of govern- 
ment. The Eleventh Amendment, which prohibited a suit 
against a State, was a paradox, contrary to the system 
the fathers evolved. Surely Washington contemplated the 
States, and the State officers should be made to live up to, 
if not enforce, the National law, constitution and statute. 
It was the immunity from State control that enabled the 
Abolitionist lawyer to render the tenure of property in man 
so insecure. The fiction of the immunity of a State from 
a suit by an individual is still preserved. A governor of a 
State cannot be sued, but a Federal or State court may, by 
way of a mandamus or an injunction, — a ring, as it were, 
inserted in the nose of the man who may happen to be 
governor, — lead or force that man to respect the natural 
and constitutional rights of the individual or corporation, 
notwithstanding a State statute may authorize, indeed, may 
command, the confiscation of the property or the imprison- 
ment of the individual without a fair trial. 

Saith the Fourteenth Amendment: 

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge 
the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States, 
nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property 
without due process of law, nor deny to any person within its 
jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. 

But such is man's inhumanity to man that quite aside 
from the negro, whom it was primarily designed to protect, 
by describing him as a person, lawyers of practical expe- 
rience will tell you that the courts are more willing to extend 
the protection or the guarantee of the Fourteenth Amend- 
ment to a corporation than to a white man. And this, too, 
although the word corporation is not in the Fourteenth 



NEGRO SUFFRAGE 329 

Amendment. By the use of the word person, the courts 
held that Congress and the people intended to include cor- 
porations, although the word person in the original draft 
of the Constitution and the first ten amendments the courts 
held did not include the corporations. Indeed, as Walter 
Q. Gresham said, the war legislated, but it did not, as he 
also said and held as a judge, destroy the States. 

Andrew Johnson's first message was that of a states- 
man. By the time the Congress assembled, December 5, 
1865, he had seen the light; he was no longer for making 
treason odious. Whoever wrote his message to that Con- 
gress — and it by no means follows that simply because it 
was in the handwriting of George Bancroft, the historian, 
it was Mr. Bancroft's conception and not that of Andrew 
Johnson, — the fact is, that President Johnson adhered to 
the policies therein set forth. "It is not competent for the 
general government to extend the elective franchise in the 
several States. The freedmen must be protected in their 
liberty, their property, their right to contract and to labor." 

In the face of Secretary Seward's construction of the 
recently ratified Thirteenth Amendment, and the resolution 
of John A. Bingham, a Republican member of Congress 
from Ohio, introduced two days after the message was 
read to carry into effect its recommendations by way of a 
Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United 
States, it is extraordinary that a lawyer like Senator Lyman 
Trumbull, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee of the 
Senate, should, with the support of senators like Sumner, 
Wade, and Doolittle, and members of Congress like Thad- 
deus Stevens, James G. Blaine, and Roscoe Conkling, a 
few days later by an amendment to the Freedmen's Bureau 
Bill and Civil Rights Bill insist on unlimited negro suffrage 
and on visiting the State judges with penalties for obeying 
the laws of their States, which prohibited negroes testifying 
in court. Still more extraordinary is it that such men 
would quarrel with a President for vetoing such measures 



330 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

as unconstitutional, there not yet being any Fourteenth 
Amendment. 

That something more was involved in the late strife 
than the mere freeing of certain slaves, had occurred to many 
of the men of previous legal training who had had experience 
in putting down the rebellion. They had their views and 
their experiences. Certainly those of Walter Q. Gresham 
had been different in the Natchez district from those of 
any man in Congress. 

Mere learning and abihty to argue do not make a states- 
man. Many men, says Lord Macaulay, by reason of their 
ability to argue fail to reach any conclusion, not to mention 
the correct one. Their less gifted fellows, but with keener 
perceptions, hit it off across lots, like a woman, and land 
right. In his life of Lyman Trumbull, Horace White con- 
fesses that he and Senator Trumbull were mistaken in con- 
tending that the Thirteenth Amendment, as Trumbull 
finally drafted it, conferred unlimited power on Congress in 
the late rebellious States. He also is mistaken in stating 
that Mr. Lincoln would have failed as Johnson did. 

Twenty years later, while Walter Q. Gresham was 
United States circuit judge and Lyman Trumbull and ex- 
Senator Doolittle of Wisconsin — who broke with his party 
and joined with Trumbull in voting against Johnson's 
impeachment — were practicing attorneys in that court, 
I heard them and others discuss Andrew Johnson, "the 
impeachment," and the Thirteenth and the Fourteenth 
Amendments, as the lawyers sa}^ up one side and down the 
other. Of the two, Mr. Doolittle seemed the brighter and 
quicker. Able and learned, Judge Trumbull did not always 
see things until they had passed him. But when he saw 
his mistake he hesitated not to make amends. Doolittle 
broke to Johnson's support sooner than Trumbull. 

One evening at dinner in 1890, my husband said: "If 
the author of the Thirteenth Amendment ever knew, he has 
forgotten how to try an ejectment suit." I know enough 



NEGRO SUFFRAGE 331 

about an ejectment suit to know that the plaintiff if he 
recovers at all must recover on the strength of his own 
title. Continuing, Judge Gresham said: "Yesterday morn- 
ing Judge Trumbull rested his case without proving an es- 
sential link in his chain of title. Trude/ for the defendant, 
— it struck me for the purpose of misleading Judge Trum- 
bull and getting him where even I could not help him, — 
made a great showing for the defense. Judge Trumbull 
came back on the rebuttal but still he did not supply the 
missing Hnk. Had he been a young man I would have told 
him what to do. Instead I said, 'Gentlemen, I have some 
matters in chambers I would like to dispose of this after- 
noon. It will accommodate me if you will let the argument 
of this case to the jury go over until to-morrow morning.' 
All looked surprised but consented. This morning Judge 
Trumbull asked leave to supply the missing link, which 
was granted, and we made short work of his case." 

But going back to 1866, Walter Q. Gresham, as a mem- 
ber of the Committee on Resolutions of the Indiana State 
Convention, which met at Indianapolis on the 2 2d of Feb- 
ruary, took the lead in siding with Andrew Johnson and 
Congressman Bingham of Ohio against Sumner, Thaddeus 
Stevens, Trumbull, and the radical lawyers. There was a 
contest, but the majority and the controlling men on that 
committee were soldiers. General Benjamin Harrison was 
one of its members. Radical by nature, he was too good a 
lawyer to line up with "Thad Stevens." While he would 
not lead in an attack on Governor Morton, who was sup- 
posed to be — as he was — with the radicals. General Har- 
rison always supported opposition to the "war governor." 
The resolutions indorsed Congressman Bingham's resolu- 
tion for a Fourteenth Amendment ; that is, to confer on the 
National government the power to protect the life, liberty, 
and property of the freedmen, which was the lawyer's way 

1 Trude was one of the best trial lawyers who ever stood before judge or jury. He defended 
the Chicago newspapers in the libel suits that were brought against them. 



332 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

of making them citizens but not voters. The resolution 
demanded that the United States government should make 
emancipation complete; that no State legislation should 
be tolerated that was designed to keep the blacks as a sub- 
ject and servile race; that the Constitution should be so 
amended as to exclude representation while the right of 
suffrage was denied to any portion of the people; that the 
powers of the States lately in rebellion should be held in 
abeyance so long as the public safety demanded it. A 
speedy trial was demanded for Jefferson Davis, who was 
still held a prisoner in Fortress Monroe. This was a way 
of saying, "Turn him loose," as was subsequently done, 
when it was known the government was without the evi- 
dence to convict him on the charge of complicity in Mr. 
Lincoln's assassination. 

John A. Bingham pressed the radicals, Stevens and 
Sumner, so hard in the debates in Congress that they, all 
except Sumner, came to his way of thinking.^ April 13, 
1866, Thaddeus Stevens adopted Bingham's plan, that there 
must be a Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of 
the United States. Of course Stevens added some amend- 
ments. One was a definition of citizenship. "All persons 
born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the 
jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and 
of the State wherein they reside." And while partisanship 
may have been a potent factor, as Horace White says, 
in the framing and adoption of the Fourteenth Amend- 
ment, that partisanship — and it was not all on one side — 
is obsolete. The part which we have quoted, and which 

1 "I might say here without the least fear of contradiction, that there is scarcely a state in 
the Union which does not, by its constitution or by its statute laws, make some discrimination 
on account of race or color, between citizens of the United States in respect of civil rights. 
But by act of Congress you can't strike down these discriminations. . . . The law in every 
state should be just: it should be no respecter of persons. ... I would remedy that not 
by an arbitrary assumption of power, but by amending the Constitution of the United States 
expressly, preventing the states from any such abuse of power in the future." 

In conclusion, Binghani quoted Chancellor Kent on the necessity of preserving our dual 
form of government: "It is to the state to protect life, liberty, and property that we must 
look in the first instance." 



NEGRO SUFFRAGE 



333 



Bingham wrote, squared our dual system of government for 
the first time with the natural, inherent, and inalienable 
rights of man as Otis first applied them and as set forth in 
the Declaration of Independence. But with all the par- 
tisanship it did not make the freedmen voters. It did not 
confer the ballot on the freedmen. Sumner's amendments 
to that effect were voted down. That the "Dough-faces" 
and the Southern brigadiers were mistaken in rejecting the 
Fourteenth Amendment is manifest when we consider that 
Thaddeus Stevens said: "Accept the Fourteenth Amend- 
ment and I will vote to admit your senators and congress- 
men." June 1 6, 1 866, Congress submitted it to the States 
for ratification. 

Michael C. Kerr, the Democratic member of Congress 
from our district — which was then the second — voted 
against submitting the Fourteenth Amendment to the 
States for ratification. The convention which renominated 
Mr. Kerr on the 28th day of June, 1866, while Congress 
was still in session, declared against the Fourteenth or any 
other Amendment, and indorsed President Johnson's course 
in demanding the admission of the late rebelHous States 
without condition. It declared that the late war on the 
part of the government of the United States became just 
and necessary to save the Union from disruption and the 
Union from overthrow, but that now the union of the 
States should in fact as well as in name be restored. 

Against his wishes, General Gresham was substituted as 
the Union party candidate for Congress in the Second Indiana 
Congressional District, when W. T. Spicely, who had come 
out of the army as Colonel of the Twenty-fourth Indiana 
Volunteers, "declined the nomination for business reasons." 
The Democrats charged that the real reason was that the 
Colonel was still a Democrat, had voted for Breckenridge, 
and had been a member of the Lecompton Convention in 
Kansas. The Colonel retorted that he was against the 
Knights of the Golden Circle, and that he would stand by 
22 



334 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

the speech Gresham had made in nominating him — which 
it was said by others was a better exposition of the Four- 
teenth Amendment than Governor Morton had made a 
few days before. In his speech of acceptance, in his joint 
debates with Colonel Cyrus L. Dunham — a good lawyer 
who had made a fine record in command of the Twenty- 
ninth Indiana Volunteers, — and with General John T. 
Cravens, before Mr. Kerr returned home, and in his joint 
discussion with Mr. Kerr, Judge Gresham made his po- 
sition clear, only incidentally waving the "Bloody Shirt." 
He said: 

I like the people of the South to-day better than I did six 
years ago, but I do not want them to return to their allegiance 
without a guaranty to the loyal people of this country that the 
war will not have to be fought over. Whenever the South accepts 
the Amendment proposed, I shall cheerfully give my vote to admit 
her representatives in Congress. They abandoned their places; 
and now, with assurance almost equal to that with which they 
left, they come back and demand a restoration of their seats in 
Congress. And that same party, which stood in all its power and 
looked complacently on their going out, is clamorous in favor of 
granting their request, arguing that the moment we conquered 
them we restored them to their former loyalty, and hence they 
were qualified for their former positions. 

This same party in 1864 declared the war a failure and its 
prosecution unconstitutional. Now they retract those words and 
say the soldiers saved the Union, but that their representatives 
in Congress (the government that could suppress rebellion cannot 
legislate against its repetition) remove the cause of the difference 
and secure the fruits of victory. The statement of the case car- 
ries with it the refutation of their conclusion. 

The Union party, on the contrary, says the Union was not 
and cannot be dissolved, except by successful revolution, that the 
close of the Rebellion found the rebellious States "without civil 
government," and that by their treason the people of these States 
succeeded in getting out of their relations to the Federal govern- 
ment; that they exchanged their old and loyal for a new, disloyal 



NEGRO SUFFRAGE 



335 



relation; that they forfeited their civil rights under the government 
of the United States, and in voting them rights, we have the 
power to demand terms by way of security for the future. 

The Fourteenth Amendment is to do this: 

It is legal and magnanimous ; such that loyal men can accede 
to and only disloyal reject. The first section is simply to protect 
negroes in their dealings or contracts with Southern white men. 
It simply secures to all persons natural and civil rights; it does not 
confer political privileges. It does not confer suffrage, only citi- 
zenship. It is just as proper to say it confers suffrage on white 
women and children, or on negro women and children, as on ne- 
gro men. Second, the Fourteenth Amendment is to prevent the 
Southern States from having a representation in Congress for 
their negro population and yet deprive the negro of the ballot. 
Third, to cause the Rebels to give some evidence of their loyalty 
before being admitted to all the rights of loyal citizens. Fourth, 
to guarantee the payment of the war debt and provide that the 
Rebel debt should not be paid. 

In discussing the second section, he showed that the 
Democratic party —including his competitor, Mr. Kerr, 
who he said was his personal friend— intimated that the 
South should now have thirty members of Congress rep- 
resenting her negro population. 

The party that prates about this being a white man's govern- 
ment not only asserts that the Southern Rebels shall be restored 
to all their rights, but they shall have thirty negro representatives 
in Congress. 

One Confederate soldier should not be permitted to be equal 
to two Northern loyal soldiers at the ballot box. As it now 
stands, 60,000 white people in a district in the State of Mississippi, 
together with 60,000 negroes, send a representative to Congress, 
while here it takes 120,000 white people to do the same, so that 
any way you may fix it, the vote of one Rebel soldier is equal to 
the vote of two loyal soldiers of the North. And yet they de- 
nounce us as Abolitionists and advocates of social equality. The 
men that aided and abetted those who fought against the govern- 
ment are fighting that this unequal representation shall continue. 



336 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

I will say unequivocally that I am opposed to it. If, as the 
Democrats say, this is a white man's government, why are they 
insisting on representation for the negroes of Mississippi? The 
Democratic party is connected by ties of consanguinity, as is mani- 
fested by the mulattoes with the negroes as is no other political 
organization. 

The Union party has no disposition to make the negro equal 
to the white man, and its members have no fears that he ever 
would be their equal. I believed the whites to be a superior race, 
contrary to the belief of my Democratic brethren, as evinced in 
the terrible alarm about the blacks becoming their equals, and 
their eternal cry of having laws enacted to hold them back. They 
seem to believe that, now the negro is free, he would improve 
rapidly; that the good Democrats would soon be equaled or sur- 
passed by him, unless his advancement was checked by law. 
Instead of attempting to check his progress, all the humane and 
Christian considerations as well as public safety and prosperity 
demanded that the negro be given the due and equal protection 
of the law. 

But giving the negroes protection under the law was 
different from making them voters. "It is not logical to 
argue that because when I was very young, and before I 
knew the objects of the Know-nothing, I opposed granting 
suffrage to the foreigner, the Irishman, and German, there- 
fore I am for negro suffrage. I admit I never was an advo- 
cate of unlimited suffrage." 

In the joint discussion with Colonel Dunham before 
Congress adjourned and before Mr. Kerr got home, this 
question was put up to the Colonel: "Did not Mr. Kerr 
defeat you for the nomination because he [Kerr] was a 
member of the Knights of the Golden Circle, and you 
[Dunham] were not, but were at the front with your regi- 
ment?" Colonel Dunham said this was an unfair question 
and he would not answer it. 

In the discussion with Mr. Kerr it was shown by the 
testimony taken before the military committee and by 
the statements of Horace Heffron, that on March 8, 1863, 



NEGRO SUFFRAGE 337 

Kerr was initiated into the order of the Sons of Liberty and 
Knights of the Golden Circle in GofT's saddlery shop in New 
Albany. 

Jefferson Davis had commissioned Horace HefTron a 
major-general in the Confederate army, and early in 1863 
General Heffron started out to organize an army in south- 
ern Indiana. The same organization was at work in southern 
Ohio and Illinois. One of the plans was to kill Governor 
Morton, release the prisoners in Camp Morton, and turn 
the State over to the Confederacy. Undoubtedly many 
men were brought into the organization without knowing 
its ultimate object. Until the time should arrive to come 
out in the open, enlistment in the Union army was to be 
discouraged and appeals made to those in the army to 
desert. In the discussion with Colonel Dunham, my 
husband read one of the Colonel's letters written to the 
Governor, giving him specific instances in which appeals 
were coming to men in his regiment to desert. 

At many places there were personal conflicts but they 
never stopped a meeting. A large body of mounted and 
armed ex-soldiers, headed by the "Teagardens," came to a 
joint meeting in Orange County with a banner, "Loyal 
men vote for Gresham, traitors vote for Kerr." And it was 
with difficulty they were prevailed on as a personal favor 
to Mr. Gresham, to allow Mr. Kerr to speak. At Utica, 
in Clark County, the opposition filled the hall and said 
my husband should not be allowed to speak. He climbed 
in at one of the windows, so one of Henry Watterson's re- 
porters afterwards said, "laid a revolver on the table, and 
made the bitterest campaign speech that was ever heard 
on the banks of the Ohio." 

I Hstened to some of the speeches and think my hus- 
band erred in being too bitter. Sometimes he would begin 
his speech: "Mr. Kerr served in one army, I in another." 
I heard one of these speeches. The next morning at break- 
fast I said, "If all the men who were in Mr. Kerr's army 



338 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

vote for him, you are beaten." He answered: "I can't 
be elected and I don't expect to be, but I can lead and drive 
enough of the soldiers to vote the State and legislative 
tickets to enable us to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment." 

The membership of the Sons of Liberty or Knights of 
the Golden Circle in southern Indiana was large. It in- 
cluded practically all the Democrats who had not been in 
the Union army, and they made a majority. 

At one of the joint discussions Mr. Kerr lost his temper 
and denounced General Heffron as a liar. Then General 
Heffron and a lot of the Knights announced their purpose 
of voting for Gresham, and they undoubtedly did so. 
Years afterwards it was said that Mr. Kerr was one of the 
men who disclosed to Governor Morton the treasonable 
character of the Knights of the Golden Circle. Had that 
statement been made in 1866, Gresham would undoubtedly 
have defeated Kerr. My father belonged to the Knights, 
never denied it, and voted for Kerr, but it made not the 
slightest friction with my husband. 

By iterating and reiterating the statement that the 
Fourteenth Amendment conferred negro suffrage and that 
the radicals would control the Republican organization, 
some of the soldiers in southern Indiana, of Democratic 
antecedents and a majority of the voters, were held against 
the Republican organization. At the same time, George 
D. Prentice in the Louisville Journal, supplemented by the 
Courier, again published by General Simon Bolivar Buck- 
ner in Louisville after an intermission, was arguing against 
the Fourteenth Amendment because they said it conferred 
negro suffrage. 

In his canvassing my husband had the aid of Benjamin 
H. Bristow and John M. Harlan, the Kentucky lawyers 
who afterwards became famous. In addition to canvassing 
his own district, Walter Q. Gresham was sent up to Shelby- 
ville and to Senator Hendricks' old congressional district, 
to expound to the soldiers the Fourteenth Amendment. 



NEGRO SUFFRAGE 339 

Flags fluttered in the breezes, the bands played while the 
Democratic soldier was worked right up in front of the plat- 
form from which hung extracts in large letters from the 
speech which Senator Hendricks had made in February, 
1863, in which he was urging the soldiers not to re-enlist, 
and deprecating the war as an Abolitionist war. Then the 
soldier speaker on crutches went at them, and it is said the 
returns showed that he got every Democratic soldier, even in 
Senator Hendricks' home town of Shelbyville, to vote for 
members of the legislature who would vote to ratify the 
Fourteenth Amendment. 

On a normal vote the Second Indiana Congressional Dis- 
trict was then 4,000 Democratic, and although many Ken- 
tuckians came to our side of the river to vote for Mr. Kerr 
and against the Fourteenth Amendment, Mr. Kerr's ma- 
jority was cut to 1,750 and the Democratic State and leg- 
islative tickets suffered accordingly. The Union party, 
as it was then almost universally called, elected its State 
ticket and a working majority of the legislature. When 
the legislature assembled in January, 1867, it ratified the 
Fourteenth Amendment, displaced our friend Henry S. 
Lane, elected Oliver P. Morton to the United States Senate, 
and Walter Q. Gresham State Agent. The handling of 
the State's finances took Mr. Gresham often to New York, 
where the interest on the State debt was payable, and 
where the firm of Winslow, Lanier & Company was then, 
and continued to be, the State's fiscal agent. In the man- 
agement of the State's finances, which were then involved,, 
Walter Q. Gresham broadened his knowledge of finance, 
which was always sound. 

Governor Morton was no sooner in his seat in the Sen- 
ate in 1867 than he voted to incorporate negro suffrage into 
the Reconstruction Acts. The Fourteenth Amendment had 
not then been ratified by the requisite number of States. 
In a speech at New Albany, Indiana, July 19, 1866, Gov- 
ernor Morton recorded his opposition to negro suffrage. 



340 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

This speech was delivered at Walter Q. Gresham's request, in 
response to the speeches made a short time before at New- 
Albany by Senator Hendricks and Joseph E. MacDonald, 
arguing that the Union party was for negro suffrage and 
the Fourteenth Amendment would confer it. Enough has 
gone before to make it clear that the Fourteenth Amend- 
ment did not confer negro suffrage. That came through the 
Fifteenth. 

James G. Blaine was right when he said that it was the 
soldier voter who ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, but 
he was in error when he said the election of 1866 meant 
negro suffrage, if he meant that the soldiers favored un- 
restricted negro suffrage. Many who could not break to 
the Southern leaders and the "Dough-faces" thought it 
was a breach of faith to impose negro suffrage on them. 
Governor Morton's action as to incorporating negro suf- 
frage into the Reconstruction Acts, and its subsequent 
ratification by the Republican party, all but took Walter 
Q. Gresham out of that party. 



CHAPTER XX 

CANDIDATE FOR CONGRESS AND DECLINES 
SENATORSHIP 



GRESHAM RESUMES PRACTICE OF LAW — AGAIN DEFEATED 
AS CANDIDATE FOR CONGRESS — ADVOCATES RATIFICATION 
OF FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT — OPPOSES THE FIFTEENTH 
AMENDMENT — REFUSES TO BE CANDIDATE FOR UNITED 
STATES SENATOR — DECLINES GRANT's OFFER TO BE COL- 
LECTOR OF PORT OF NEW ORLEANS. 

NOVEMBER I, 1865, when able to walk on crutches, 
General Gresham opened a law office in New Albany, 
Indiana, and chents flocked in. After a time a partner- 
ship was formed with John Butler of Salem, the firm being 
Butler & Gresham. Again the junior member was on the 
circuit. He liked the trial work. Often the lawyers were 
not employed until the term of court began. Then the 
defendants were met with their summons, the case set for 
trial and disposed of at the term. Presently Mr. Butler's 
son, Noble C. Butler, was admitted to the bar, and became 
a member of the firm. Then there was a dissolution of 
the partnership by mutual consent, and it was Gresham 
alone in the practice. A housekeeper knows whether 
business is good or not. We were in easier circumstances 
at this time than at any time afterwards. Most of Mr. 
Gresham's practice was trial work. 

In the Orange Circuit Court he secured the acquittal of 
some soldiers charged with murder. Daniel W. Voorhees 
was special counsel for the State, and Judge George A. 
Bicknell, on the bench, did all he could within his sphere 
to convict, but the verdict was for the defendant. Before 
the trial began it was known that Judge Bicknell was "for 
the State," as the saying is. His charge to the jury was 

341 



342 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

anticipated and countered. My husband knew how to try 
a case before a jury. He knew the rights of an advocate 
and he respected them after he was on the bench. In 1864, 
while a number of the soldiers of the Twenty-fourth Indiana 
were home on a veteran furlough, one of their number, 
Thomas Parish, was killed by John McCoit at Orleans. 
Parish was then on his way to join his regiment. McCoit 
was a member of the Knights of the Golden Circle and was 
a leading Rebel sympathizer. When news of the murder 
reached other members of the regiment at Mitchell, where 
they were waiting to take the train for St. Louis to go to 
the front, they seized a hand car and proceeded to Orleans, 
only five miles north, and in the fight that followed in a 
hardware store where McCoit and others had barricaded 
themselves, McCoit was killed. The soldiers then went 
South and joined their regiment. On their return in 1865 
they were arrested and put to trial. After showing that 
McCoit had belonged to the "Knights," my husband 
closed his speech for the defense by saying, that it was 
war, the only difference being that McCoit was in the army 
operating in the rear instead of the front. John F. Moore 
and Columbus Brown were acquitted in Orange County 
and Benjamin Wright in Lawrence County. As the saying 
is, they "venued" Wright's case to Lawrence County and 
continued it from time to time until September 12, 1868, 
when he was acquitted. 

In 1867 the Fourteenth Amendment was still wanting 
in the requisite number of States to ratify it. The October 
elections that year in a number of States were adverse 
to the Republican or Union party. My husband no more 
believed in Thaddeus Stevens's financial policy (as will ap- 
pear) than in his reconstruction policy. 

On October 15, 1867, Mr. Gresham wrote to his former 
partner : 

The result of the election in Ohio and Pennsylvania, especially 
in the former, is most disastrous. Of course the negro question 



CANDIDATE FOR CONGRESS 343 

had something to do with bringing about the result. Without 
the greenback question Ohio would have gone for us by at least 
30,000 majority. How do 3'ovi suppose Andy Johnson feels ? You 
and others at Corydon had better stop talking about impeachment. 
The truth is, I have never allowed myself to speak of the President 
disrespectfully, and I can now remember with satisfaction how I 
stood up for him in our last State Convention. 

My husband was a delegate to the Republican Con- 
vention that assembled in Chicago in 1868. Of course he 
favored General Grant's nomination. Again he was a can- 
didate, but against his will, for Congress. Governor Baker 
came to the convention which met at Orleans, Indiana, 
and insisted on Gresham being nominated. Again Kerr 
was the Democratic candidate. The Indiana legislature of 
1867, in order to make other districts certainly Republican, 
had thrown additional Democratic counties into the Sec- 
ond Congressional District. This made the district over- 
whelmingly Democratic. In the spring of that year, Henry 
Watterson had associated himself with the management of 
the Louisville Journal, and he and George D. Prentice jointly 
trained their guns on the Fourteenth Amendment, claiming 
it meant negro suffrage. The Courier was still under the 
editorship of Simon Boliver Buckner, who was saying that 
the States had never been out. It was more bitter but was 
less ably edited than the Journal. July 21, 1868, Congress 
declared the Fourteenth Amendment adopted, reciting that 
it had been ratified by thirty out of thirty-six States. Then 
the editors and Democratic campaign speakers declared 
that as soon as Congress met in December it would pass a 
law enfranchising the negroes en masse. Again there were 
joint debates. 

Mr. Watterson pubHshed all the speeches of the Repub- 
licans of that year except my husband's. He afterwards 
said that Gresham's speech on the Fourteenth Amend- 
ment and what led up to it was the strongest made in 
its support, and as he, Watterson, was from personal and 



344 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

political motives especially interested in the election of 
Mr. Kerr, he did not publish it. Later, Mr. Watterson 
adopted the Fourteenth Amendment. He was the first 
Southern leader to do so in good faith. 

Thomas A. Hendricks, one of the best campaigners 
ever at the hustings, was the candidate against Governor 
Baker, who wanted to succeed himself. To Shelbyville, 
Mr. Hendricks' home town, to other points in Shelby 
County, and to other counties in Hendricks' old congres- 
sional district, my husband was sent to make speeches to 
get back into line the Shelby County soldiers who had 
been led ofT by Hendricks' assertion that if the Republicans 
succeeded they would at once give the negroes the ballot. 
Again, it is said the soldier orator satisfied the soldier voters 
that Hendricks' claim was untrue, and Governor Baker 
was elected and the Republicans carried the legislature.' 

Again the Kentuckians had votes to spare to send across 
the river. Frank P. Blair was the Democratic candidate 
for Vice-President. He was deservedly popular with the 
soldiers, from General vSherman down. General Blair was 
making speeches in Indiana everywhere, except in my 
husband's district. He wrote to General Gresham: "I 
hope you will be elected." The Republican National Com- 
mittee became alarmed about Indiana when they could not 
induce General Sherman to say even a word for General 
Grant as against Blair. General Sherman's silence was the 
subject of a special meeting of the Republican National 
Committee in New York. J. Russell Jones, the member of 
the National Committee from Illinois, and General Grant's 
special friend, was sent to Indiana "to straighten things 
out." Mr. Jones was later one of our near neighbors and 
friends in Chicago. Wealthy, he belonged to the school of 
practical politics. I can quote his words: 

It was a delicate mission. After two or three days at the 

1 Hendricks lost only by 1,000 votes while Grant defeated Seymour in Indiana by 
10,000. In 1872 Hendricks defeated General Brown for Governor by 1,000 while General 
Grant carried the State by 20,000. 



CANDIDATE FOR CONGRESS 345 

Bates House in Indianapolis with ' Ham ' Conner, the Chairman of 
the Repubhcan State Central Committee of Indiana, I broached 
the subject of politics. After a general discussion, I asked him 
how things were in Indiana. "We are all right," he said, "were 
it not for the fact that the Democrats will bring so many Ken- 
tuckians across the river in the southern counties to vote that 
they may outvote us." I then looked at him hard and said, 
"Can't you get as many across the river as they can?" Conner 
replied, "Oh, yes, but that costs money." "I am here to pay 
the bills," I rejoined. We found that while the Kentuckian 
would cross the river to vote against the radical Republican 
ticket, he would not do so to vote it, so we established head- 
quarters at Vincennes and LaPorte and operated most suc- 
cessfully across the Illinois and Michigan State lines, leaving 
the Democrats the southern counties, but we outvoted them. 
At Vincennes the bed bugs almost ate me up. On the way to 
the inauguration when we reached Altoona, General Grant said 
to me, "Jones, you have never indicated to me the place you 
want, so I guess I will appoint you Postmaster at Vincennes 
and let you fight it out with the bedbugs."^ 

Again my husband had the aid of Colonel Benjamin H. 
Bristow of Louisville in his campaigning. But again Mr. 
Kerr had a good majority. 

Following the election the Greenfield Republicans came 
out for Gresham for United States Senator. ' ' Ham' ' Conner, 
the chairman of the Republican State Central Committee, 
said he could be elected and offered him his support. A 
number of the members of the legislature proffered theirs. 
Governor-elect Baker offered his aid and even Senator 
Morton sent word that he would interpose no opposition 
to Gresham' s candidacy for the Senate. In the face of the 
declarations on the stump and the party platform my hus- 
band considered it a breach of faith to engraft unlimited 
negro suffrage into the Constitution, and so it was that the 
declaration of the leading man in Washington, that the elec- 
tion of General Grant meant negro suffrage, led Mr. Gres- 
ham without hesitation to decHne to be a candidate for the 

1 Mr. Jones was appointed Minister to Belgium. 



346 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

United States Senate before the legislature elected in 1868 
had assembled, which it did early in January, 1869. 

On February 24, 1869, the men in Washington started 
the fifteenth of the suffrage amendments through Congress. 

February i, 1869, General Grant, as President-elect, 
wrote General Gresham, stating that he wanted Gresham 
to go to New Orleans as soon as the new administration 
came in, take the collectorship of the port with large per- 
quisites, and be the President's adviser in that section. 
General Grant's letter was supplemented by one from John 
A. Rawlins, Secretary of War to be, urging his old com- 
rade to accept Grant's offer and promising him almost un- 
limited discretion. When Walter Q. Gresham respectfully 
declined, John A. Rawlins' answer for Grant, under date 
of February 20, 1869, stated that Grant said he admired a 
man who could say "no" when an office was tendered him, 
more than he did one who could not accept "no" when he 
was asked for an office. 

To his former partner my husband wrote : 

Since I saw you I have received a very kind and flattering let- 
ter from General Grant, not written by Rawlins, but by himself. 
I have declined his offers and said to him that I expect nothing from 
his administration; that I am disgusted with politics and expect 
to keep clear of all such things in the future. Have just received 
a dispatch from Tom McCarty saying that he has information 
from Washington that General Grant is going to send my name 
to the Senate for a good office. I presume Tom's informatidn 
comes from Governor Morton, but I guess my name will not be 
sent in as General Grant has certainly received my last letter 
before this. 

My mind is now made up; I will accept no offer, I care not 
what it is. I know that you will laugh when I say that I have 
no political aspirations, and that I would not to-day go to the 
United States Senate if I could. I am disgusted with the whole 
thing, I think the Republican party is an infernall}^ corrupt con- 
cern, and I don't care how soon it is broken up if the Democracy 
don't survive it. 



CANDIDATE FOR CONGRESS 347 

Because Walter Q. Gresham was then opposed to negro 
suffrage, it must not be understood that he had abated any 
of his desire and purpose to elevate the black race. "Noth- 
ing stamped in the Divine likeness and image was brought 
into the world to be trodden on and degraded." He had 
been opposed to putting the black men into the army be- 
cause of the bitterness it might and did generate. The 
attempt to rule the white through the black would be a 
failure and an injustice to both races. But to deny them 
the equal protection of the law, to keep them in ignorance 
and degradation, made them a menace to society. 

The world was bright to me when I first saw Washing- 
ton. It was just after General Grant's first inauguration. 
I saw it with young eyes. It was an enchanting place. 
Even the old National Hotel was a dream to me. Think 
of the stuffy, ill-kept rooms; the huge spittoons, not any too 
clean, around them and on every floor to be stumbled over; 
the darky servants not better kept than the rooms. And 
the table service was not better than we can find in any 
country town now. Ah, but there were the terrapin, shad, 
and the corn bread such as we cannot get now! 

In the lobby and halls the great crowds made up of the 
senators, judges of the Supreme Court, country congress- 
men, and other public men of the day, were fascinating. 
Here men I had read about were met face to face. I 
dropped into the hfe, heard a lot of politics, and some 
gossip — for even statesmen and judges will gossip. 

I remember how I sat in wonder as Judge Otto told me 
Mr. Lincoln was fond of gossip, too, for he used to sHp out 
of the White House at ten o'clock and stay chatting until 
midnight. The world has always given women the credit 
of tattling, but I have heard men tell in an idle way things 
that a woman would only dare whisper. 

My husband was very popular in Washington at this 
time. He was pointed out as the man who would not take 
an office. General Rawlins, Secretary of War, spread the 



348 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

report. Ours was a pleasure trip. We made several later 
trips, mainly for the purpose of my husband using his 
influence for friends who had asked him to intercede for 
them with General Grant. Mr. Gresham dreaded the first 
trip. Notwithstanding General Grant's kind message to 
him through Rawlins, he thought that the President would 
be displeased with him because he declined to go to Louis- 
iana for him, but he was mistaken. On his first visit to the 
White House, General Grant said, "You are a lawyer and 
I want you to accept the office of district attorney for 
Indiana." "No, General," he said, "I cannot accept it. 
I promised General Thomas Brown to speak to you for him 
for the place, and if you desire to place me still further 
under obligations to you, you will appoint him." General 
Brown was appointed. Many men whose preferment he 
secured repaid him with ingratitude. One of the men he 
suggested to General Grant was Benjamin H. Bristow. 
My husband's friendship for Bristow, after Bristow left the 
cabinet, almost cost him the good-will of General Grant. 
Bristow was one of Mr. Gresham's friends until death. 



CHAPTER XXI 
UNITED STATES DISTRICT JUDGE 



APPOINTED UNITED STATES DISTRICT JUDGE FOR INDIANA 
— A BELIEVER IN ARBITRATION OF LEGAL DISPUTES — EQUITY 
PROCEDURE — ^ PATENT CASES — THE NATIONAL BANKRUPTCY 
ACT OF 1867 — UPHOLDS TRIAL BY JURY — JUDGE GRESHAM's 
METHODS WITH THE JURY. 

SEPTEMBER 9, 1869, General Grant, without Walter 
Q. Gresham's knowledge, sent his name to the Senate 
as United States District Judge for the District of Indiana. 
There were many • applications for the place. Senator 
Morton desired his partner appointed, Judge Kilby of Rich- 
mond, Indiana, but he made no opposition in the Senate 
when Mr. Gresham's appointment came up for confirmation. 
There was hesitancy about accepting. My father, who had 
forgotten the animosities of the war, advised against it. 
But the advice of lawyers and want of harmony with the 
policy and leaders of the Republican party, finally decided 
General Gresham's course. He was on the bench long 
before he was confirmed in December. 

For several years prior to that time, John D. Howland 
had been Clerk of the District and Circuit Courts and 
Master in Chancery. He was an able and accomplished 
lawyer of wide experience at the bar. In familiarizing the 
new judge with his duties, John D. Howland was a great 
aid to Mr. Gresham. Mr. Howland died in 1877, when he 
was succeeded by W. P. Fishback. Gifted with the pen, 
Mr. Howland organized the Indianapolis Literary Club. 
As a member of the Committee of the Indianapolis Bar 
Association he drafted, without an interlineation or an 
erasure, a memorial on the life and services of Senator 

349 
23 



3SO LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

Morton that received the unanimous concurrence of his 
associates and went into the records of the court. But for 
his age John D. Rowland would probably have been ap- 
pointed to the district judgeship instead of Walter Q. 
Gresham. It was supposed he was to be appointed instead 
of David McDonald in 1864, but at the last minute, so 
Thomas A. Hendricks said, Mr. Lincoln had yielded to 
the politicians and to his own impulses. 

We continued to live at New Albany and went back and 
forth between there and Indianapolis. Thomas A. Hend- 
ricks, then out of the United States Senate, and Mrs. 
Hendricks were living at the Bates House in the Fall of 
1869, and when we went there to spend the winter cordial 
relations were established with them that were never after- 
wards interrupted. I met most of the lawyers and many of 
the people of Indianapolis. Among my first callers were 
Ezekiel MacDonald and his wife. Ezekiel MacDonald was 
the son and partner of Joseph E. MacDonald. At this visit, 
Mr. MacDonald said, "I was almost afraid to meet your 
husband when he first went on the bench. Both times 
when he was a candidate for Congress, I canvassed his 
district against him, and I denounced him more bitterly 
than I ever supposed I could talk about any man. Your 
husband knew what I had said about him, for my speeches 
were published. We had never met. But when I called 
at his chambers, his greeting was cordiality itself." 

Soon a United States Court was established at New 
Albany. In an important case in which his former opponent 
for Congress, Michael C. Kerr, was counsel on one side, 
and Alexander Dowling, one of the leading lawyers in south- 
ern Indiana and active as a Republican, was counsel on the 
other, Mr. Dowling and the Republican partisans of the 
time thought it strange that the justice of Mr. Kerr's client 
should win over Mr. Dowling's technicalities. 

On his way to Washington to the meeting of the Su- 
preme Court, Judge David Davis stopped at Indianapolis 



UNITED STATES DISTRICT JUDGE 351 

to hold court and help the young judge take up the lines 
of his work. Judge Davis was one of Mr. Lincoln's ap- 
pointments on the Supreme Court of the United States. 
He was the circuit justice then assigned to the Seventh 
Circuit, composed then as now of the States of Indiana, 
Illinois, and Wisconsin. After we went to live at Indian- 
apolis, and in Chicago, Judge Davis was frequently our 
guest. He was an immense man in size. We had a special 
chair made for him. He was a great judge, and few 
of his or any other time excelled him in writing short, 
luminous opinions. He had not the gift of expressing him- 
self extemporaneously, as he often had to do on the circuit, 
and I have heard him swear about the way a few of the 
newspaper men reported some of his oral opinions. In- 
stead of editing, a reporter would sometimes quote him 
verbatim. And then the Judge would say, "That damn 
fellow misquoted me." Judge Davis was a very rich man. 
I have often heard him tell how he made money in buy- 
ing land when he was a young man going through Illinois 
and Iowa. "We would always buy if we heard there was 
a piano in the neighborhood." 

And there was Judge Thomas Drummond, the circuit 
judge. He was always our guest when he came to Indian- 
apoHs. Educated, cultured, and accomplished far beyond 
Judge Davis, he had not the facility and executive ability, 
it was said, for dispatching business that Judge Davis 
possessed. Judge Drummond was a native of Maine. He 
had graduated from Bowdoin. Coming early to Illinois, 
he had settled at Galena, served in the legislature with Mr. 
Lincoln, and was appointed United States District Judge 
for the District of Illinois by President Taylor. When the 
office of circuit judge was created in 1868, Thomas Drum- 
mond was appointed to that office for the Seventh Circuit. 
In the meantime Illinois had been divided and Samuel 
H. Treat was appointed District Judge for the South- 
ern District of Ilhnois, while Henry H. Blodgett succeeded 



3 52 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

Judge Drummond as the district judge for the Northern 
District of lUinois. 

The office of circuit judge was created to help reheve 
the congestion of business that was then accumulating in 
the Circuit Court. Up to that time the district judges 
with the aid of the circuit justices had been able to keep 
the dockets of both the District and Circuit Courts clean. 
The circuit judge was also an intermediate Appellate Court 
between the district judges and the Supreme Court. 

On May i, 1870, while fishing on the abutment of 
Mauk's Mill on Indian Creek, two miles below Corydon, 
my husband slipped and fell on his left hip. The bone was 
broken just below the greater trochanter. At first, it was 
feared the fracture was in the neck or in the socket. If so, 
a union would probably have been impossible. Injured as 
the Hmb had been during the war, even as the fracture was 
finally diagnosed it was feared it would not unite. But after 
twelve weeks in bed the invalid was on crutches. His 
anxiety about his May term of court at IndianapoHs, — 
he contemplated resigning in order that some one might be 
appointed so that the public business might not suffer — 
was soon relieved by Judge Davis, who wrote him, May 24: 

Immediately upon learning from Mr. Howland of the terrible 
accident that had befallen you, I replied to him that Judge 
Drummond and I would hold your court and remain as long as 
there was any business to do. I relieved Judge Drummond last 
week and will probably be able to close the term by the last of 
next week. Everything is moving along pleasantly, and although 
your absence is regretted and great sympathy felt for your mis- 
fortune, the public business will in no wise suffer. 

I congratulate you upon your success since your advent to 
the bench. You have already won golden opinions from the bar, 
and I feel assured that your reputation as an upright and able 
judge and courteous gentleman, already secured to you by the 
universal testimony of those I meet, will constantly increase. 

One of the stories of that term of court will illustrate 



UNITED STATES DISTRICT JUDGE 353 

Judge Davis's methods and how he cleared the calendar. 
General Benjamin Harrison, as attorney for the plaintiff, 
was insisting on going to trial in a case in which the attorney 
for the defendant was absent. Judge Davis suggested the 
case be continued. General Harrison was insistent. Final- 
ly Judge Davis said, "General, you are entitled, under the 
rules, to a trial and you can have it. I had a case of this 
kind the last time I was in the Circuit Court at Springfield. 
The attorney for the defendant was absent and I had to 
look after the defendant's interest. And, would you be- 
lieve it, General, our side won." "Continue the case," said 
Harrison. 

Alexander Hamilton's saying that "Justice is the end 
of government," Walter Q. Gresham always kept in mind. 
The place to vindicate the judicial system, he said, was in 
the court room. 

Formula and English equity procedure, as Chief Justice 
Marshall had pointed out at the time of the adoption of 
our Constitution, were all the fathers had adopted of the 
British system of equity — -not equity itself. The lan- 
guage of the Constitution of the United States is, "The 
judicial power shall extend to all cases in law and equity 
arising under this Constitution." But, as there is no defini- 
tion of equity in the Constitution, when on the chancery 
side of the court Walter Q. Gresham believed in exercising 
and did exercise, in the particular case, that original flexi- 
bility of the rules of equity that gave rise to their existence 
and justified their name. This policy led to controversies, 
not only with parties lawyers but with some of his brethren 
on the bench. 

The divisions and balances on the American system, 
not designed to produce immobility, Walter Q. Gresham 
understood better than most of his critics, because he un- 
derstood better than they what had gone before. 

A life tenure in the judges during good behavior, with 
appeals to the House of Lords to be decided primarily by 



354 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

the law lords; the belief that the Commons would inter- 
vene, in the event the lay lords should fail to take a hand 
in seeing that substantial justice was done; and the re- 
tention of the jury — these provisions Walter Q. Gresham 
believed had made the modern English system of judicature 
(that is, since 1688) the best in the world. ^ And from 
the system of the mother country, the fathers, in organiz- 
ing our own judicial system, did not so far depart as is now 
very unwisely and not correctly asserted (it was very 
unwisely asserted by many that they did) as to make the 
Federal judges absolute.- Attempts at absolutism on 
the part of the American judiciary. Judge Gresham be- 
lieved would and should meet the same resistance and 
revolution that had reformed the English system. 

Frequently have I heard it said that, "the tendency 
is for school teachers, preachers, and judges, especially 
judges with a life term, to become pedants. Because they 
have the only, or the last say, the tendency is to absolut- 
ism." Aware of this tendency Walter Q. Gresham was 
always on his guard against it. 

Many a time in open court Judge Gresham advised 
opposing parties, instead of going to trial, to settle or arbi- 
trate their differences. There were criticisms; but there 
were also precedents, — some of the best are not in the 
books. 

One day at Springfield, a case came on for hearing before 

iln 1884 in Hartado!'5. California, no U. S. si6, page 531, Justice Matthews said: "The 
omnipotence of Parliament over the Common Law was or is absolute, even against common 
right and reason. The actual and practical security for English liberty against legislative 
tyranny was the power of a free public opinion represented by the commons." 

2 In the first milestone of the Constitution, Chisholm vs. Georgia, 2 Dallas 419, on page 458, 
Justice Wilson in 1793 said: "The principle is that all human law must be prescribed by a 
superior. This principle I mean now to examine. Suffice it, at present, to say that another 
principle different in its nature and operations, forms, in my judgment, the basis of sound and 
genuine jurisprudence; laws derived from the purer source of equity and justice must be founded 
on the consent of those whose obedience they require. The sovereign when traced to a source must 
be found in the man." Speaking before the Illinois State Bar Association, May 28, 1914. 
on the subject, "The Administration of Justice," William R. Riddle, a member of the 
Supreme Court of Ontario in the Dominion of Canada, touching on the absolutism of the 
American judges and its corollary the Judicial Recall, said: "The Court is not (at least in 
my country) the master of the people." 



UNITED STATES DISTRICT JUDGE 355 

Justice David Davis on the equity side. A German had 
married back in Germany, and after the birth of three 
children had deserted his family and come to the United 
States. In Illinois he had married again, and after the 
birth of the third child of this union he died. Mean- 
time he had accjuired a fortune. The contest was between 
the two widows and the two sets of children. The second 
set claimed that proof that the decedent was the father 
of the first set was imperfect. Toward the end of the 
hearing, as the court convened for the afternoon session. 
Judge Davis said, "Gentlemen, this is the most perplexing 
case this court has ever been called to pass on. I am 
utterly unable to give you any information as to what 
the judgment of the court will be. Should the court hold 
the first marriage valid, it will bastardize the issue of the 
second marriage, and they will get no part of this large 
estate. If, on the other hand, the court holds the first 
marriage void, it will bastardize the first set of children 
and they will get nothing from this large estate. There is 
enough for all. Gentlemen, I can tell you this much: it 
will take this court a long time to reach a conclusion in 
this case. And now, while I hear Brother Connelly's ap- 
plication for a temporary restraining order, there is a 
vacant room to which you may retire if you desire to con- 
sult about the frailty of human judgment and the uncer- 
tainty of the law." They retired as suggested, consulted 
together, speedily came to a settlement, which was an 
equal division of the property, and then in open court 
dismissed the suit. 

While an infringement of a patent is nothing but a tres- 
pass and should properly be considered on the law side of 
a court, the practice has been for the equity or chancery 
court to take cognizance of all questions relating to the 
vaHdity and infringement of patents. 

Soon called to sit with Judge Davis in a patent case, 
with eminent counsel on both sides. Judge Gresham was 



356 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

astounded and humiliated at Judge Davis's frank remark, 
"We do not know anything about patents." True as to 
himself, for his practice had not run in that line, he thought 
it was not becoming a man of Judge Davis's ability and ex- 
perience on the bench. But like many another man of no 
experience in patent litigation who went on the Supreme 
bench when in the meridian or past middle age, with no 
fondness nor aptitude for mechanics. Judge Davis never 
mastered that branch of the profession. It was the only 
department of law in which he was lame. Walter Q. 
Gresham determined that should not be true of him, so he 
applied himself industriously to that particular branch, and 
he mastered it, at least to the extent that he felt competent 
to decide every question that came to him. He was aided 
in thus quaHfying himself, by Judge Drummond, a most 
excellent patent judge, who always insisted that Judge 
Gresham sit with him in the patent cases heard at Indian- 
apolis. Ignorance of mechanics and prejudice against 
monopolies have led many men on the bench to be against 
all patents. It was easy to say, "There is no novelty in 
the device." Many were like Judge Davis, but few were 
so frank. 

The old patent lawyer sought Judge Gresham's court. 
Many a time was our library cluttered up with briefs, 
records, and models of machinery in patent cases. One 
night at IndianapoHs, when Judge Drummond and my 
husband were considering a suit for infringement on an im- 
provement to a shuttle on a sewing machine, we brought 
down my sewing machine and I was the demonstrator. It 
was a late hour when we concluded, and when we did I 
knew how that case would be decided. It was not long 
until I had a new sewing machine. 

So long as the Constitution of the United States and 
the laws to enforce it granted a limited monopoly to the 
inventor, the author, and the artist, Walter Q. Gresham 
considered it was his duty as a judge, in good faith to 



UNITED STATES DISTRICT JUDGE 357 

recognize and protect that monopoly. It was against public 
policy to permit an employer to acquire a patent which an 
employee had secured during employment. Therefore, he 
held an assignment by an employee to an employer, in ad- 
vance of the issuance of the patent and during the employ- 
ment, void. 

He made mistakes in patent and other cases and ac- 
knowledged and corrected them. In Gottfried vs. Crescent 
Brewing Company (9 Federal Reporter, 762, and 13 Federal 
Reporter, 479), after holding, in a written opinion, letters 
patent No. 42580, for pitching beer barrels, invalid because 
the process had been anticipated in Germany and St. Louis, 
on a rehearing, with models and further testimony, he re- 
versed himself, and said: "The complainant's device was 
the first, and the proof shows that it is to-day the only 
means by which brewers are enabled to pitch barrels and 
kegs without removing the heads." 

M. Romero, long the Mexican minister at Washington, 
in a sketch prepared after my husband's death, but which 
he did not pubhsh because of reasons of state, had this to 
say about the judicial side of Judge Gresham: 

One incident showed very clearly the good faith which con- 
trolled all Mr. Gresham's conduct. I had asked him, under 
instructions from the Mexican government, for the extradition 
of a Francisco Bonavides, who had organized an armed force in 
a portion of Texas, adjoining the Rio Grande River, and invaded 
Mexico, attacked a small detachment of regular troops that were 
stationed at a small town called San Ignacio. near the boundary 
line in the state of Tamaulipas, burned the place, including 
wounded soldiers, plundered everybody there, and as soon as he 
heard that Mexican troops were coming against him, left the place 
and returned to United States territory, with some prisoners to 
enjoy their booty, calling himself revolutionist. Mr. Gresham 
had sent me a letter dated on the 6th day of April, 1893, denying 
the extradition, on the ground that the offense was of a political 
character, and in this case he followed the opinion of the solicitor 
of the department, and acted in accordance with the ]:)ractice 



358 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

followed in previous cases, and of course that was on the safe side. 
I remonstrated against that decision, and told Mr. Gresham that 
I desired him to give me a hearing, just as if he was acting as a 
judge in the case, that is, to hear the opinion of the law officer 
of the department who had advised that decision, and then 
hear my reasons against it before that gentleman, so that he 
could be satisfied of the correctness of such facts as I would state 
them. He kindly agreed to do so, and on one afternoon we met 
and had an oral argument on both sides, which lasted over two 
hours, and after hearing all the details of the case, he came to the 
conclusion that I was right, that is, that the crimes of which 
Bonavides was accused were not of a political character, and, that, 
therefore, he ought to be extradited, and he wrote me a letter 
dated on May 13, 1893, i^^ which he gave the reasons for changing 
his previous decision, which he had communicated to me. In 
my long experience in Washington, and in all my dealings with 
the officers of the United States government, I have never found 
another case in which they would manfully acknowledge that 
their decision was mistaken. 

That jealousy of power that the people have always 
manifested against their Federal agents led to the early 
repeal of the first two National bankruptcy acts. The 
people preferred the insolvency laws of their respective 
States. The third Federal bankruptcy act, that of 1867, 
conferred broad and general powers on the bankruptcy 
courts. And the amount of work performed under it by 
the district judges, from its enactment until its repeal in 
1879, was enormous. Every contested matter had to be 
heard by the district judge in the first instance. These 
judges were without the aid of registers, referees, or assist- 
ants. There were but few adjudications in the Supreme 
Court under the first two bankruptcy acts, and while the 
Supreme Court, as the Act of 1867 commanded, had made 
general rules for its enforcement, the onus of putting it 
into practical operation devolved on the district judges 
under the supervisory power of the circuit judges. The 
circuit judge was the Court of Appeals in the first instance, 



UNITED STATES DISTRICT JUDGE 359 

and practically in many cases the final arbiter. The dis- 
trict judges early held that "proceedings in the bankruptcy 
case proper were proceedings in equit^^" to be governed 
by the rules and analogies of ecjuity jurisprudence, and that 
the construction should be broad and liberal, not narrow 
and technical. 

In the absence of a bankruptcy law and a secret agree- 
ment by a debtor to prefer one creditor over another, un- 
der the equity rules, as promulgated by the United States 
Supreme Court, an insolvent could prefer one creditor over 
another. But not so under the Bankruptcy Act of 1867; 
as the district judges, inclucUng Judge Gresham, construed 
it, all preferences were invalid. The object of the law, as 
they construed it, was to prevent an insolvent from making 
preferences in the payment of his debts. When the Supreme 
Court reversed this rule, as it did at the first opportunity, 
and upheld certain preferences. Circuit Judge Thomas 
Drummond took it on himself to rebuke that most august 
tribunal.! 

In the Bankruptcy Act of 1898, the Congress, in lan- 
guage too definite to be construed or distinguished, adopted 
Judge Drummond's rule and rejected that of the Supreme 
Court. 

Always respectful to the Supreme Court, Walter Q. 
Gresham always followed it. But he would sometimes 
threaten to resign before he followed it, and lack of s^^m- 
pathy with the way it was tending had much to do with 
his leaving the bench the last time. 

Recognizing the power vested in the twelve jurors, he 
felt it to be his duty under the law to bring home to them 

1 Said Judge Drummond: " This case, that a debtor might, by acquiescence, merely by 
letting a judgment go against him, especially if it be brought about by a warrant of attorney 
executed long prior to his insolvency, give one creditor preference over another, rather took 
the profession — certainly a great many of the district judges — by surprise." 

Then, after pointing out that the Supreme Court judges were not unanimous in their 
conclusions, that those whose judgments were in harmony reached that unison by conflict- 
ing reasoning. Judge Drummond distinguished the case he was then considering, from any 
decided by the Supreme Court, and knocked out the preference. Of course he declared he 
would follow the Supreme Court precedents in all cases in which they applied. 



360 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

every argument to aid them in performing their function, 
namely, weighing conflicting evidence in a case. During 
the progress of a trial he would not hesitate to assist a 
young or inexperienced lawyer, to advise a lawyer as to the 
kind of an argument to make to a jury, or to denounce a 
witness or a party to a suit within the proper bounds; for 
denunciation, sarcasm, and invective are legitimate weapons 
in debate. He had used them at the bar. He would defend 
a party or a witness unjustly assailed. In a hotly contested 
lawsuit he could state the law, so sum up the evidence 
bearing on each side as at the same time to indicate to 
the jury which party should prevail, without leaving it to 
the defeated party to predicate error on the instructions 
as a whole, because the jury was left free to adopt the 
views of that party. It is this freedom of the jury that is 
the distinguishing feature of the English or American sys- 
tem of government. The judge is a part of the govern- 
ment. The jury is not. 

Seldom it was that a jury failed or refused to find a 
verdict as indicated to them in the instructions, and but 
seldom did my husband give to a jury peremptory instruc- 
tions to find a particular verdict. And never did he, as 
some Federal judges have done, threaten a jury that if they 
brought in a verdict different from that indicated, it would 
be set aside. Neither did he ever reprove a jury that failed 
to agree or refused to find the indicated verdict. Some- 
times the argument of eminent counsel and clear instruc- 
tions failed to control the judgment of the twelve men. 
Then, if there was nothing to indicate that any improper 
influence had been brought to bear, he concluded the fault 
was with the eminent counsel and the man on the bench 
rather than with the twelve in the box. 

In 1886 Zack Hoffheimer was a struggling young lawyer 
in a back office in the Fort Dearborn Building in Chicago. 
A client was injured in a collision at a grade crossing on 
the St. Paul road. Eberling vs. Chicago, Milwaukee & 



UNITED STATES DISTRICT J U D (; E 361 

St. Paul Railroad Company was the title of the suit. When 
the case came on for trial Judge Gresham had three petit 
juries, and the courtroom and corridor were crowded with 
parties and witnesses. "Zack" started in with voluminous 
records to prove that the St. Paul Company owned the 
railroad. "Hold on, young man, we can't stop to Hsten to 
your records. Mr. Walker won't deny the St. Paul Com- 
pany owns the road. Will you, Mr. Walker?" "No, sir." 
"Now, get to your case." 

The plaintiff, Eberling, contended that at a much fre- 
quented crossing, the view to which was obstructed, he, 
with all due caution, looking and Hstening, drove on the 
crossing and was struck and injured by a train, which 
failed to sound the whistle or ring the bell. Edwin Walker, 
one of the eminent lawyers of his time, keen, forceful, and 
plausible to the last degree, showed by his witnesses that 
there was nothing to obstruct Eberhng's view as he drove 
on the track in front of the approaching engine, and that 
the whistle was sounded at the whistle post and the bell 
rung thence until the crossing was reached and the collision 
occurred. After a clear argument by Mr. Walker, based 
on the evidence, "Zack" closed his case in a spread-eagle 
speech about directors, private cars, and the aggressions of 
corporations; not a word about the facts in the case. 

"Tell me, gentlemen of the jury, if you can, how Eber- 
ling reached that crossing in time to catch that train if he 
was exercising due care and caution for his own safety," 
began one instruction. Then followed an argument by the 
court for the defendant that surpassed that of Mr. Walker, 
" Zack " said. But it was left to the jury to pass on the two 
contentions: (i) Whether it was the fault alone of the 
railroad company, and (2) whether EberHng used due care 
and caution as he approached the crossing to avoid being 
injured; if not, he could not recover. It was evening when 
the jury went out. ' ' Zack ' ' gave up his case as lost. Twelve 
ordinary men would not stand up against such a charge 



362 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

and the clear opinion of the judge. Besides, if they found 
a verdict for EberKng, the judge would promptly set it 
aside. Morning came and a United States marshal stepped 
into "Zack's" office and said Judge Gresham would like 
Mr. Hoffheimer to come to the courtroom. There was the 
jury in the box, and Mr. Walker and a crowded courtroom. 

"Mr. Hofflieimer, the jury has been out all night and 
have not yet reached a verdict. Mr. Walker is willing; 
will you consent that I send them in charge of the marshal 
to the crossing where the collision occurred?" Dazed by 
the question, "Zack" answered, "Yes, your Honor." 

After viewing the premises the jury returned, went into 
their room and soon returned with a verdict for the plaintifif , 
and assessed his damages at $4,000. Mr. Walker promptly 
made a motion for a new trial. vStill hardly realizing what 
had happened, Hoffheimer met Judge Gresham as he left 
the courtroom. "Zack, you have won your lawsuit," said 
the Judge, and the next day the motion for the new trial 
was overruled. 

Now for the application : the question of the elimination 
of grade crossings was acute at that time. Since then, 
the elevation of railroad tracks in and about Chicago has 
ended the question. 

In another case, in 1879, a defendant was on trial in the 
Federal court at Indianapolis before a jury for having vio- 
lated the provisions of the pension laws in taking for his 
services, in obtaining a pension, a larger sum than was 
permitted by the statute, which was an offense punishable 
by fine and imprisonment. The judge was always jealous 
of the rights of all soldiers and all pensioners. During the 
trial the defendant became a witness in his own behalf, and 
testified that he had received out of the pension money 
collected a sum equal to ten per cent, amounting to one 
hundred and fifty dollars, but said further that this sum 
had been paid to him by the prosecuting witness, a soldier's 
widow, for legal services rendered in successfully defending 



UNITED STATES DISTRICT JUDGE 363 

her against a criminal prosecution in a State court. He 
said that he had been appointed by that court to defend 
her for the reason that she had represented that she was 
without means to employ counsel ; and that for his services in 
that trial, which occupied several days, the court had only 
allowed him the small sum of twenty-five dollars, whereas 
his services were of much greater value; that immediately 
afterwards she employed him to secure the allowance of 
her pension claim then pending in the department; that 
when the pension money was received it was deposited to 
her credit in a local bank, and then she said, "Now I will 
pay you for acquitting me. What is your fee?" To which 
he replied, ' ' Whatever you please. ' ' And thereupon she had 
said to the cashier of the bank, "Give him ten per cent." 
And the cashier thereupon paid over the sum of one hundred 
and fifty dollars. The cashier was dead; she had already 
testified that she had paid this sum as the fee for obtaining 
the pension. At the close of his direct testimony, the 
prosecuting attorney began the cross-examination, which, 
as Judge Gresham thought, was being done in a lazy man- 
ner, and turning to the witness he said, "Let me ask this 
witness a question or two and see if I can't get at the 
truth. Do you think that the court would have paid you 
the fee you received, if he had known that this woman had 
a pension coming out of which she would pay you.''" 

Mr. Harris, the defendant's counsel, interrupted, saying 
to the court, "While I don't object to your Honor examin- 
ing my client, I do object to his being required to answer 
as to what the court might have done had this woman told 
him that she had a pension claim, and that she expected to 
hire the defendant to get it and then intended to pay him 
for her defense." 

The judge turned, and in his frank but firm manner 
said, "I didn't put the question that way." There was no 
stenographer. And so Mr. Harris said, in a half jocular 
and half earnest manner, "I'll leave it to the jury." The 



364 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

judge responded at once, "That's fair. I'll leave it to the 
jury, too." He then turned to them and said: 

"Here is a question between Mr. Harris, a member of 
the bar, and myself, the judge, and we have agreed that you 
shall decide between us. Now you are not to be controlled 
by the fact that I am on the bench and Mr. Harris is at the 
bar, for in this court the bench and the bar are all officers 
of the same court and stand on an equality. Now, men, 
you are to determine whether I asked the question as Mr. 
Harris said I did. Do your duty." 

The jury took the matter very seriously and gathering 
closely around their foreman, whispered together for a 
short while, and then returned to their seats. Whereupon 
the judge said, "Mr. Foreman, are you ready to report?" 
' ' We are. " " What is your report, Mr. Foreman ? " " Well, 
Judge, we all think you're dead wrong." 

The judge and everyone in the courtroom, except the 
jury, laughed heartily. Then the judge, turning to the 
district attorney, said, "Go on, go on in your own way." 

At the close of the case the jury returned a verdict of 
"Not guilty." At once the defendant arose, and with 
tears running down his face asked permission to thank the 
jury for his acquittal. The judge said, "Yes, you may, 
and I join with you, for had the verdict been otherwise, I 
might have felt that I had wrongfully influenced the jury 
in the discharge of their duty." 

During an investigation by the regular grand jury, of 
the affairs of the First National Bank of Indianapolis, 
the district attorney was instructed by the attorney-general 
that he had been ordered by President Hayes to discon- 
tinue the investigation. Thereupon the grand jurors filed 
into open court during the trial of a case in which Thomas 
A. Hendricks was one of the counsel and asked what they 
they should do in the premises. "The President of the 
United States has no more control over your deliberations 
than the Czar of Russia. You have been told what the 



UNITED STATES DISTRICT JUDGE 365 

law is; if you find it has been violated, you should return 
indictments against the guilty parties." Subsequently, 
there were indictments. As the jury retired to their room, 
the judge said, "Go on, Governor." At the adjournment 
of court, Governor Hendricks asked, "Don't you fear those 
instructions will get you into trouble?" "It hadn't so 
occurred to me," Judge Gresham replied. At the governor's 
instance, they were reduced to writing and filed with the 
clerk, but never seem to have been included in the reports.* 



1 The reported opinions of Judge Gresham while he was on the district bench are found 
in Volumes 2 to 1 1 of Bissell's Reports, and Volumes 2 to 17 of the Federal Reporter. 

24 



CHAPTER XXII 
RAILROAD RECEIVERSHIPS 



MONON ROAD DIFFICULTIES — RAILWAY MORTGAGES UN- 
LIKE OTHER MORTGAGES — SUPREME COURT UPHOLDS JUDGE 
DRUMMOND's CONCLUSION AS TO RAILWAYS BEING PUBLIC 
CONCERNS — CONTROVERSY OVER MR. PIERCE AS RECEIVER 
— LEGISLATION CONCERNING PUBLIC SERVICE CORPORA- 
TIONS. 

ONE of Walter Q. Gresham's first judicial acts brought 
him in touch with a question that became of the greatest 
importance to the country, — the public character of the 
railroads, their organization, reorganization, and the integ- 
rity of their management. It was a departure from funda- 
mentals to hold that the earnings of a railroad shall be 
applied in the first instance to the payment of wages and 
salaries, for supplies like coal, oil, tools, machinery, rails, 
engines and cars, and for balances to connecting lines in 
order to keep the railroad in operation, before any payments 
are made on account of the capital that went to construct 
the road; in other words, bondholders and stocldiolders only 
get the net over and above the cost of maintenance and 
operation. As a corollary to this it was said that in the 
case of insolvency and a receivership that the receiver, after 
discharging the costs of operation, should use his net in 
paying the arrears to labor and supply men that existed at 
the time he was appointed, before making any payment on 
the interest or principal of the bonds, especially in cases 
where the railroad company had used the earnings that 
should have met the cost of operation and maintenance in 
paying the interest on the bonds in order to postpone a 

366 



RAILROAD RECEIVERSHIPS 367 

foreclosure. In some cases, like those last mentioned, in 
the event of the sale of the railroad, the proceeds of the sale 
were and are applied to liquidate the unpaid labor and 
supply claims before the bondholders realize anything. 

When Judge Gresham went on the bench this ques- 
tion had been suggested in a case that had been pending for 
twelve years in the Circuit Court of the United States for 
the District of Indiana, namely, Williamson, Trustee, against 
New Albany & Salem Railroad Company, afterwards the 
Louisville, New Albany & Chicago Railroad Company, now 
the Chicago, IndianapoHs & Louisville Railroad Company, 
or the "Monon Line. "^ The New Albany & Salem Rail- 
road Company, organized to build a railroad from New 
Albany thirty miles to Salem, Indiana, was one of the first 
railroad corporations chartered by the State of Indiana. 
"Its history," an old lawyer for the plaintiff told the jury, 
in a hotly contested personal injury suit, "is written in 
every graveyard along the line." It began by making a 
mortgage to secure funds to construct and complete its 
line; and as it extended north, finally to Michigan City, 
two hundred and eighty-eight miles, it executed in all five 
mortgages. These mortgages covered, in addition to the 
railroad, acquired and to be acquired, all the personal 
property of the corporation and its earnings. 

In 1857, David D. Williamson, the trustee in these mort- 
gages, brought a suit in the United States Court for the 
District of Indiana entitled as above, and asked, in ad- 
dition to the foreclosure of the mortgages, the appoint- 
ment of a receiver for the railroad corporation and all its 
property, because the net earnings from the operation 
of the road had been used in paying laborers and strikers, 
in paying contractors for construction work done on the 
extension of the line, and in repaying borrowed money, 
although leaving much still unpaid, instead of paying the 
interest on the mortgages that fell due January i, 1857. 

1 I Bissell 108. 



368 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

Justice McLain of the vSupreme Court, sitting as the circuit 
justice, in November, 1857, heard the motion for the re- 
ceiver. He decHned, inasmuch as the appointment of a 
receiver was a matter within the discretion of the court, 
tjien to appoint one, but retained jurisdiction, with the 
right to WilHamson to renew his motion, because, as the 
justice said: "If a receiver had been in possession, I would 
have required him to do what has been done by the com- 
pany." Therefore he ordered the company to report to 
the court at stated intervals the gross and net earnings, 
and that the net earnings be apportioned between the 
mortgage creditors whose interest was in arrear, and the 
holders of the floating debt incurred to meet operating 
expenses and the completion of the line north. That the 
use of the earnings and the borrowed money in completing 
the line had benefited the holders of the bonds, aside from 
the consent of some of the bondholders, was the justifica- 
tion Justice McLain made for his ruling. Not a word did 
he utter about there being any difference between a mort- 
gage on the property of a public service corporation and a 
mortgage on a farm or a house. There were few consent 
orders, such as the change of the corporate name of the 
railroad company, no reports, but proper continuances from 
term to term, and thus the case stood until the November 
term, 1869, of the United States Circuit Court for the 
District of Indiana. 

Meanwhile Williamson, as trustee under the mortgages 
before mentioned but representing only a part of the bond- 
holders secured by these mortgages, without notice to the 
other bondholders and without leave of the Federal court 
but with the consent of the corporation, had, by proceed- 
ings regular on their face, procured from the Common Pleas 
Court of White County, Indiana, the appointment of a 
receiver for the railroad and all the property of the railroad 
company, then a decree of foreclosure and a sale and a 
conveyance on the 21st day of June, 1869, by the sheriff 



RAILROAD RECEIVERSHIPS 369 

of White County, Indiana, of all the property of the com- 
pany to a corporation recently organized under the laws of 
Indiana differing in name from the old only in that the 
word "Railway" was used instead of "Railroad." From 
this reorganization, typical in many respects of railroad 
"wrecking," except the few bondholders and stockholders 
who brought it about, all the other bondholders, stock- 
holders, and floating creditors were excluded. August i, 
1869, Williamson died. 

November i, 1869, John S. Shaw, one of the frozen-out 
bondholders, appeared before the new district judge in the 
case of Wilhamson, Trustee, vs. New Albany & Salem Rail- 
road Company, showed the proceedings by the White County 
Common Pleas Court, suggested the death of Wilhamson, 
showed that Charles E. Bill, the alternative trustee to Wil- 
liamson in the five trust deeds or mortgages of the New 
Albany . & Salem Railroad Company, was alive and living 
in New York, and asked that cause be shown why Bill 
should not be substituted as complainant instead of Wil- 
liamson, why a receiver should not be appointed for the 
Louisville, New Albany & Chicago Railroad Company, the 
old company, and why he, Shaw, should not be made a 
party to the suit, to be entitled Bill, Trustee, vs. Louisville, 
New Albany & Chicago Railroad Company, to look after 
his own and the interest of those bondholders similarly 
situated as he was. 

November 10, 1869, Henry Crawford, one of our towns- 
men, who afterwards became famous as a lawyer in the 
reorganization of railroads, one of the ablest in his line, ap- 
peared for George L. Schuyler, the president of the Louis- 
ville, New Albany & Chicago Railroad Company or the 
"Monon Company," and resisted Shaw's motion. James 
Hughes and Samuel Huff represented Mr. Shaw. After a 
full hearing an order was entered that Bill be substituted 
as complainant instead of Williamson, that Shaw be made 
a party to protect his interests, that the bondholders who 



370 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

had procured the White County proceedings be made 
parties to answer as to their acts, that as to the appoint- 
ment of a receiver the case be continued, and that in the 
meantime a copy of the order as entered be served on Bill 
in New York and proof of the service on Bill be made on 
or before the ist day of February, 1870. 

At the time appointed, Bill, as the survivor and suc- 
cessor in trust to Williamson, appeared in the suit in the 
Federal court, and then as complainant lined up with the 
wreckers and moved to dismiss the suit. This motion after 
argument was overruled June 4, 1870, by David Davis, the 
circuit justice, while District Judge Gresham was laid up 
with a broken leg. 

November 29, 1870, Thomas Drummond, the circuit 
judge, and his associate. District Judge Gresham, sustained 
the balance of Mr. Shaw's motion and appointed George 
H. Chapman receiver of the Louisville, New Albany & 
Chicago Railroad Company. Judge Drummond delivered 
an elaborate opinion, showing the necessity for this action, 
that the proceedings in the White County Court were col- 
lusive and void and if enforced would put a minority of 
the bondholders and stockholders into absolute ownership 
of the property of the Louisville, New Albany & Chicago 
Railroad Company, worth many times the face of their 
securities or their interest in the property, to the exclusion 
of the majority of the bondholders and stockholders of that 
company, to say nothing of the claims of the unsecured 
creditors. Disclaiming any purpose to interfere with the 
rightful jurisdiction of the State court, no matter how much 
they might regret it, they could not shrink from a contest 
with that court, for by Justice McLain's orders in 1857 and 
the subsequent orders the property in controversy had been 
in the interim as much in the custody of the Federal court 
as if a receiver had been appointed in 1857. 

Mr. Schuyler, as president of the " Monon Company," 
refused to turn over the property when General Chapman 



RAILROAD RECEIVERSHIPS 371 

came to New Albany, the headquarters of the company, to 
take possession, standing on the proceedings in the White 
County Court. There was much excitement at New Al- 
bany, and talk of what would be the consequences of 
a conflict of jurisdiction between the State and Federal 
courts. 

Meeting Henry Crawford on the street. Judge Gresham 
said: "Harry, you and your chent will get into trouble if 
you continue to defy our authority. You should advise 
them to acquiesce." The advice was given, and without 
further friction brought prompt acquiescence. Many peo- 
ple said: "Somebody should have been put into jail for 
contempt of court." That was a power Judge Gresham 
believed in exercising sparingly, and, as a matter of fact, 
he never did exercise it. To the lawyers, as officers of his 
court, Judge Gresham never hesitated to appeal, seldom to 
threaten. Through his associates at the bar he often 
worked more successfully than through the marshal. 

In the order appointing General Chapman receiver of 
the Louisville, New Albany & Chicago Railroad Company, 
he was directed to pay all claims on the payrolls, all claims 
for supplies, balance to connecting hues, and claims for 
stock killed that had accrued for a period of three months 
previous to his appointment. This is the first order of that 
kind ever made in a contested suit.^ 

It was in this suit and in other suits in which receivers 
were appointed in the Seventh Circuit that Judge Thomas 
Drummond developed the pohcy first suggested by Justice 
McLain, and finally adopted by the Supreme Court of the 
United States, that railroads were public utihties and that 
in the management of railroads by receivers in foreclosure 
proceedings, mortgage hens might be displaced in favor of 
parties with claims in which ordinary litigation, and liti- 
gation prior to that time, would be subject to the mortgage. 

At one time more than half of the railroad mileage in 

IThis order is in the court records but not in the books. 



372 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

Illinois and Wisconsin was operated by receivers appointed 
by Judge Drummond and the Federal district judges within 
those States. The question arising out of the operation of 
a railroad Judge Drummond discussed with his "brethren," 
the district judges, as he called them. He discussed such 
questions with my husband. 

Although Judge Drummond had said in 1864, in the 
Chicago & Alton foreclosure,' that "a railroad mortgage is 
the same as a mortgage on a farm or house," and therefore 
he could not allow claims for supplies that went to better 
or improve the road before the appointment of a receiver, 
yet the exigencies of the situation, as he himself soon said 
and often repeated, forced a change in the rules. "A rail- 
way mortgage is not like an ordinary mortgage on a farm 
or a house. A railway is a matter of pubhc concern." 
Operated largely on credit for labor and supplies. Judge 
Drummond said, when applications were made to him to 
appoint a receiver, that arrears for wages and supplies that 
kept the railroad in operation should first be Hquidated. 
This he did under the equity powers of the court. 

The records of 1859 in the clerk's office of the Circuit 
Court of the United States for the Northern District of 
Illinois show that originally, in 1859, in appointing the re- 
ceiver in this identical Chicago & Alton foreclosure, Judge 
Drummond had directed him to pay certain unliquidated 
claims which had accrued in the operation of the road prior 
to his appointment. This order is nowhere mentioned in 
the reports of the decisions of the courts. It was in large 
degree a consent order — that is, the mortgagees or the 
bondholders consented, indeed urged, the appointment of 
the receiver subject to the payment of the claims. Judg- 
ment creditors, that is, other creditors than the bondhold- 
ers, objecting to the appointment of a receiver and to the 
jurisdiction of the court, were charging that the mortgage 
securing the bonds was invalid, because it undertook to 

I Denniston vs. Chicago. Alton & St. Louis Railroad Company, 4 Bissell 414. 



RAILROAD RECEIVERSHIPS 



3 73 



cover real estate — right of way and station ground^ and 
personal property, such as engines, cars, handcars, tools, and 
other personal property, including earnings. There was no 
statute of Illinois then or now authorizing real and personal 
property to be covered by the same mortgage. In the or- 
dinary mortgage on a farm or a house in Ilhnois at that 
time personal property could not also be included. In 
other words, a creditor could only secure a hen on personal 
property by a chattel mortgage, executed and recorded with 
formalities different from those that attended the real estate 
mortgage. The judgment creditors argued that engines, 
cars, tools, coal, and other supphes are personal property. 
Assuming the validity of the railroad mortgages as to the 
right of way and the depots, the judgment creditors argued 
that the real estate mortgage did not cover the cars and 
engines, and therefore, the liens acquired by the executions 
issued on their judgments, and levied on certain cars and 
engines, were the first liens on the engines and cars. To 
have recognized their claims would have dismembered the 
property, for without engines and cars a mere railroad track 
would not be much of a railroad. This forced the courts 
to differentiate the railroad from the farm and to declare 
that the chattel mortgage acts of Illinois and of other States 
did not apply to rolling stock, conceded by all to be personal 
property, neither did the statutes as to the ordinary real 
estate mortgage, such as covered a house or a farm, apply 
to a railroad mortgage. Under the law in Illinois, as in 
most States, when real estate is sold under execution or on 
foreclosure, the debtor is given the right for a year or more 
to redeem by paying his creditors in full. But it was de- 
cided this right to redeem, or "equity of redemption," 
of which the Supreme Court of the United States said 
an equity court could not deprive a debtor, did not apply 
to railroad property. In other words, that in selling a rail- 
road many miles in length, covering many different parcels 
of real estate, and including engines, cars, and tools, it 



374 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

should be sold as an entirety, and that there should be no 
equity of redemption. 

It was further objected in 1859, in the Chicago & Alton 
foreclosure as in other cases, that inasmuch as the railroad 
mortgages provided that the bondholders could take pos- 
session of the railroad and appropriate to their own use the 
income and earnings, therefore a Federal court had no power 
to appoint a receiver at their instance. So in order to get 
within the protecting arm of the Federal government, the 
bondholders in the first instance made concessions to judg- 
ment creditors, and to other creditors — they agreed to pay all 
sorts of claims. The courts in "dispensing" statutes had to 
do the same. This distinction the Supreme Court after- 
wards ignored when the bondholders recanted their position 
as supplicants, as disclosed in Judge Drummond's orders in 
1859 and his words in 1864, and demanded as a matter of 
right that the court, by a receiver, recognize only in the 
first instance the mortgage Hen. Judge Drummond's prop- 
osition that a railroad mortgage is not like an ordinary 
mortgage on a farm or house w^as resisted over and over 
again. One eminent lawyer, Abram W. Hendricks, who 
always appeared for the bondholders, after a heated argu- 
ment, in which he could not change the judge's opinion, 
said : ' ' God rules in Israel, but Thomas Drummond in the 
Seventh Circuit." 

A popular phrase was, "It was paying the Tin Bucket 
Brigade first." Colonel R. G. Ingersoll coined this ex- 
pression in an argument in which he appeared for the bond- 
holders, but its utterance made more for the engineers, 
firemen, trainmen, and trackmen whose claims for back pay 
he was resisting, than his eloquence and logic for the bond- 
holders. Much of the credit and discredit for first incor- 
porating the principle in our jurisprudence was laid at Judge 
Gresham's door. Neither are his due. But in blazing the 
way, Judge Drummond had Judge Gresham's cordial sup- 
port. Indeed, the junior repeatedly urged his senior and 



RAILROAD RECEIVERSHIPS 375 

superior to put his views in writing in some of the numerous 
cases that came before him. Judge Gresham did not think 
it comported with the proprieties to write an opinion in 
such a case so long as his superior had not, in a formal 
written opinion, recanted his views as expressed in 1864 in 
the Chicago & Alton case. 

In the practical operation of railroads by receivers. 
Judge Gresham followed Judge Drummond's oral views and 
the practice the exigencies dictated. He did so in the or- 
der appointing General George H. Chapman, in November, 
1874, receiver of the Lafayette, Muncie & Bloomington 
Railroad Company. 

November i, 1874, Judge Drummond appointed Gen- 
eral James H. Wilson receiver of the St. Louis & South- 
eastern Railroad Company, which built the railroad from 
St. Louis to Nashville via Evansville, Indiana, now a part 
of the "L. & N." system. April i, 1875, in response to 
a rule to show cause why certain judgments theretofore 
rendered in the State courts against the railroad company 
for damages for killing stock and for ties furnished should 
not be paid. Judge Asa Iglehart, the counsel for the re- 
ceiver and the bondholders — it was they who had secured 
the receiver — strenuously objected. Elijah M. Spencer, a 
practicing attorney of Mt. Vernon, Indiana, and General 
J. M. Shackelford of Evansville represented the claimants. 
Judge Iglehart, than whom no one was abler or more eminent 
in his profession, insisted that the rule of law requiring the 
discharge of the mortgage or bond obligations first, or before 
the payment of judgment for stock killed and for ties, was 
inflexible. To quote an eyewitness. Judge John W. Spencer 
of the Indiana Supreme Court and the son of the chief 
counsel for the claimants : 

Judge Gresham mildly expostulated that the rule should not 
be literally enforced, as in doing so it would work a hardship — 
injustice. Judge Iglehart contended for a rigid compliance with 
the rule, and in an animated argument iterated and reiterated 



376 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

that the rule was inflexible. Judge Greshani asked him a few 
times if he would urge the inflexibility of the rule. "Yes," 
vehemently replied Judge Iglehart. "Well," said Judge Gresham, 
"in this instance we will flex her a little. To do otherwise would 
fail of doing justice, and it may save the receiver and the court 
great inconvenience and trouble, for otherwise those Wabash 
farmers are liable to take up a part of this railroad and throw it 
into the Wabash River." 

Equity or justice to the individual was the only thing 
that could give the equity courts, when acting as part of 
the administrative power of the Federal government, the 
confidence of the people and of the local authorities — a 
thing that helped, if it did. not enable, the Federal court of 
the National government to perform its functions. 

It was not until 1878 that Judge Drummond put his 
views for his policy in writing, when a final stand was made 
against him by the bondholders because of the large amount 
of claims he proposed to make them pay before they could 
get possession of their railroad after they had bought it at 
a foreclosure sale.i Exhaustive arguments were made by 
Ashbel Green, the author of standard textbooks, J. D. 
Campbell, General Benjamin Harrison, R. E. Williamson, 
J. Augustus Johnson, G. W. Parker, and Charles W. Fair- 
banks against the judge's policy. John M. Butler, William 
A. Ketchum, Samuel M. Harrington, and A. J. Gallagher 
defended it. It is significant that Judge Drummond ad- 
mitted that there was no legal principle or equitable rule 
for his course. But if we admit the premises that a railroad 
mortgage is not like a mortgage on a farm, and that the 
appointment of a receiver is a matter in the discretion of 
the court, there is no escape from his conclusion : 

The appointment of a receiver is, to a great extent, a matter 
of discretion in the court, and it has been thought that the court 
might require the receiver to pay certain of these claims, and even 
hold the property subject to them; not as a lien on the road, but 

1 Turner v.s. Indianapolis, Bloomington & Western R. R. Co., 8 Bissell 315. 



RAILROAD RECEIVERSHIPS 377 

in the exercise of the equitable discretion of the covirt in dealing 
with ijroperty which is of a peculiar character, and under cir- 
cumstances of which the past system of litigation affords no 
example or precedent. Then it was that Judge Drummond 
said, ''It [a railroad mortgage] is not like an ordinary mortgage on 
a farm or a house. A railway is a matter of public concern." 

During the discussions which have taken place on this sub- 
ject, the allowance of these back claims has been sometimes called 
a lien, but in point of fact, it never has been, nor can it be, justly 
so considered, but, as already stated, as an exercise of the equitable 
power of the court in the premises. 

If necessary, in order to make a railroad safe to operate, 
Judge Drummond w^ould use the surplus earnings of the 
receivership to purchase new ties, iron or steel rails or rolling 
stock, or in building bridges, even, instead of paying the 
"Tin Bucket Brigade" for back wages. But if so, he 
would require the bondholders to pay the back claims 
because the surplus earnings of the receivership which 
should have been applied in payment of wages had been 
used to better the property. Especially would he do this 
if before the receivership money due for wages had been 
diverted to pay interest. "It has not infrequently hap- 
pened that railroads which were comparatively worthless 
when they came into the possession of the court, have become, 
under its administration, valuable property." And his final 
words were: "The experience of the court has satisfied it 
that it would be well nigh impossible, looking at things as 
they actually exist, to operate railroads by receivers without 
providing for payment of claims such as labor and supply 
and other claims before applying the proceeds of the property 
to the payment of the bondholders' claims." 

In many cases in which the Supreme Court of the United 
States has passed on this question it has given many reasons 
for its conclusions — Hke a woman's, not all consistent,— 
but it finally came to Judge Drummond's conclusion, para- 
phrasing his words, "that a railroad mortgage is not hke a 



378 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

farm mortgage; a railway is a matter of public concern." 
Before it did so it reversed, criticized, and rebuked Judge 
Gresham for following Judge Drummond's rule. In order 
to do so, it had to retrace some of the steps and use as its 
major premise Judge Drummond's discarded language of 
1864 in the Chicago & Alton case. 

When it came to public service corporations. Judge 
Gresham followed Judge Drummond, who, that the pur- 
pose of the legislature might prevail, took the same broad 
view in construing the legislation of Illinois and Indiana 
looking to the formation of connecting and through lines 
of railroads, that validated the mortgages of railroad corpor- 
ations. Justice Harlan on the circuit followed this meth- 
od of statutory construction, but they were all reversed ^ 
by the Supreme Court, which held that the grant of cor- 
porate powers to railroad corporations whereby one might 
acquire the right to operate the railroad — not a competi- 
tor — of another so as to make a through direct hne, should 
be strictly construed, and that any contract or lease — 
and a lease, the Supreme Court said, was not a contract in 
the ordinary sense of the term — not within the strict letter 
of the statute was void, or ultra vires the powers of the cor- 
poration. This rule of construction would have invalidated 
many of the railroad mortgages the Supreme Court sus- 
tained. The cases arose out of the Vanderbilt and Penn- 
sylvania interests endeavoring to reach the Mississippi by 
leasing lines of railroads crossing the States of Ohio, Ind- 
iana, and IlHnois, and guaranteeing the rental of the lesser 
companies. 

The doctrine of fellow servant Judge Gresham never 
believed in, and he was never called on to apply it. De- 
fects in machinery were not one of the risks an employee 
assumed. Promptness and expedition being required of 
railroad employees — especially a brakeman making a coup- 
ling, — safe conditions were, on the other hand, guaranteed 

1 St. Louis, Alton & Terre Haute vs. Pennsylvania Company. 



CHAPTER XXIII 
THE GREAT RAILROAD STRIKE OF 1877 



CAUSES LEADING UP TO THE STRIKE — REDUCTION OF 
WAGES OF RAILROAD EMPLOYEES — STRIKE BEGINS IN WEST 
VIRGINIA — SPREADS TO PITTSBURGH AND INDIANAPOLIS — • 
JUDGE GRESHAM PREPARES TO HANDLE THE SITUATION 
— APPOINTS OLD SOLDIERS UNITED STATES MARSHALS TO 
PROTECT PROPERTY AND MOVE TRAINS — MILITARY ORGANI- 
ZATION EFFECTED TO SUPPORT MARSHALS — POWER OF 
FEDERAL COURTS CONSIDERED — ARREST OF STRIKERS WHO 
INTERFERED WITH MOVEMENT OF TRAINS ON ROADS OPER- 
ATED BY RECEIVERS. 

THE depression following the panic of 1873 was perhaps 
the longest continued that ever followed a reaction 
such as always comes after a period of expansion, inflation, 
and speculation. Many railroad corporations had become 
insolvent in Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin, and their 
roads were operated by receivers appointed by Federal 
courts. Among those, in part, within the jurisdiction of 
the United States Circuit Court for the District of Indiana 
were the Ohio & Mississippi Railroad from Cincinnati to 
St. Louis, with a branch from Vernon, Indiana, to Louis- 
ville, now part of the Baltimore & Ohio system; the Indi- 
anapolis, Cincinnati & LaFayette, the White Water Valley 
Railroad, the Cincinnati, Muncie & Fort Wayne, now 
part of the Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago & St. Louis, or 
"Big Four" system of railroads; the LaFayette, Muncie 
& Bloomington, now the Lake Erie & Western; the Lo- 
gansport, Crawfordsville & Southwestern; the road from 
Logansport to Terre Haute, now a part of the VandaHa 
system; and the St. Louis & Southeastern, the road from 

379 



380 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

St. Louis through Evansville to Nashville, now an im- 
portant part of the Louisville & Nashville system. 

Coming down to 1877, there had been several reduc- 
tions in the wages of railroad employees. Still further re- 
ductions averaging 10 per cent were to go into effect Aug- 
ust I of that year. On man}^ roads the wages were as much 
as six months in arrears. The payrolls were postponed to 
meet the interest on the bonds secured by mortgages on 
the railroads. But this was no longer true of the railroads 
operated by receivers, and neither was there to be any 
reduction in the pay of the wages of the men employed by 
the receivers. 

The wages paid the men were on the average as follows: 
Freight conductors before the panic of 1873, per day, $2.14; 
in 1877, Si-7i- Freight brakemen before the panic of 1873, 
$2.05 to $1.80; in 1877, $1.42 to $1.15. Switchmen before 
the panic of 1873, $1.90 per day; in 1877, $1.46. Freight 
firemen before the panic in 1873, $2.55 to $2.05 per day; 
in 1877, $1.90 to $1.32. Switchmen, $60 per month before 
the panic in 1873, and $40 to $45 per month in 1877. Yard 
engineers before the panic in 1873, $2.90 per day and $2.02 
in 1877. Yard firemen $1.50 before the panic in 1873, and 
$1.20 in 1877. On some of the roads there were higher 
wages, but such roads were exceptions. 

In June, 1877, and the early part of July, all over the 
country there were conferences between the men and the 
managements. In some conferences the men simply pro- 
tested against the reductions; in others they demanded the 
restoration of the scales of 1873. But in the end all ap- 
parently accepted the reductions, except the firemen and 
freight brakemen, and only a small part of these, on the 
Baltimore & Ohio Railroad at Martinsburg, West Vir- 
ginia, refused longer to work and "struck." On July 16 
the only company of West Virginia State Militia arrived 
at Martinsburg, as the strikers at this point had resorted 
to violence and refused to permit trains to be moved. 



THE GREAT RAILROAD STRIKE 381 

This small force could not quell the riot. The railroad 
company claimed it had plenty of men to take the places 
of the strikers, and that the engineers and freight conductors 
were ready and willing to work The next day Governor 
Matthews called on the President for aid, as he said there 
were no State troops in West Virginia and there was no 
provision by law for the organization of a State militia. 
On the 17 th President Hayes issued his proclamation ad- 
monishing all persons to abstain from domestic violence at 
Martinsburg and along the line of the Baltimore & Ohio 
Railroad, and to disperse to their homes. On the same 
day United States troops were started from Washington 
to Martinsburg. On the i8th, under guard of these troops, 
trains were moved out of Martinsburg. But immediately 
the strike spread to the entire Baltimore & Ohio system. 

On the 19th the strike was inaugurated at Pittsburgh 
on the Pennsylvania Railroad and rapidly spread north and 
east. On the night of the 19th Sheriff Fife of Allegheny 
County telegraphed Governor Hartranft for troops. The 
next morning, the 20th, at six o'clock, the Pennsylvania 
troops were on duty in the Union Depot at Pittsburgh. 
Meanwhile the strike was spreading not only in Pittsburgh 
but west across the country to Toledo, Detroit, Chicago, 
St. Louis, and intermediate points. The strikers and their 
sympathizers at Pittsburgh far outnumbered the soldiers. 

Saturday afternoon, the 21st, the Telegraph reported 
that there had been a riot in the outer yards at Pittsburgh 
in which one soldier and a number of strikers and onlookers 
were killed; that more troops had been sent to the scene of 
the conflict; that in the city of Pittsburgh at the 28th Street 
crossing there had been more rioting, more deaths; that 
Sheriff Fife had been shot dead and one company of the 
troops imprisoned in one of the railroad roundhouses. That 
night the strikers broke into the armories, supplied them- 
selves with arms, captured the guns of the Hutchinson Bat- 
tery, and announced their determination to massacre all the 
25 



382 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

Philadelphia troops in Pittsburgh and burn the Union Sta- 
tion of the Pennsylvania Company. 

Meanwhile there were rumors that the strike would soon 
be inaugurated in Indianapolis, and as there were only 
thirteen men at the United States Arsenal it was feared 
that the strikers and their sympathizers would capture the 
arsenal, arm themselves, and repeat in Indianapolis the 
scenes of Pittsburgh. On Saturday afternoon and night 
there had been distributed throughout the city a notice in 
large type, as follows: 

Attention, railroad men! Brace up and assert your man- 
hood. There will be a meeting held in the State House Yard 
on Monday evening, July 2j, iSyy, at 8 o'clock sharp, for the 
purpose of sympathizing and taking action with our starving 
brothers in the East who are now being trampled under the feet 
of the railroad bondholders. Everybody invited that believes in 
equality and justice to all mankind. Let us all have a hand 
in breaking the backbone of this railroad monopoly. — By 
Order of the Committee. 

One newspaper contained a well-written article signed 
"Freight Brakemen," which stated that the trouble was all 
due to the fact that many of the railroad officials who 
received large salaries were not stockholders of the rail- 
roads but were the owners of the fast freight lines, and in 
this way were absorbing much of the earnings that should 
go to the stockholders and the employees who operated 
the roads. 

At this time my husband was holding court. As the 
strike spread he manifested much anxiety as to what might 
develop at Indianapolis and at other points in Indiana on 
roads operated by the Federal receivers. These receivers 
had been appointed for the most part by Judge Thomas 
Drummond, the United States Circuit Judge for the Seventh 
Circuit, but he almost invariably asked my husband his 
views respecting the fitness of the men to be appointed. 



THE GREAT RAILROAD STRIKE 383 

These receivers were not in arrears to the "Tin Bucket 
Brigade," neither were they proposing reductions. 

There were demands by the men on the railroad mana- 
gers at Indianapohs on Saturday, the 21st, and on Sunday, 
the 2 2d. There were conferences. The men were meeting 
separately, and the managers were doing likewise. 

Telegrams and bulletins were coming all day long to the 
effect that the mob was in undisputed possession of Pitts- 
burgh and were putting their threats of the evening before 
into execution. They were pillaging and then burning 
freight depots and cars. That afternoon the mob destroyed 
thousands of cars and one hundred and twenty-five loco- 
motives in Pittsburgh. Then the bulletin came that the 
Pennsylvania Railroad Company depot in Pittsburgh had 
been set on fire by running into it some of the burning cars. 
It cost Allegheny County $15,000,000 to pay for the prop- 
erty that was destroyed that day in Pittsburgh. General 
James H. Wilson, the receiver of the St. Louis & South- 
eastern at St. Louis, was telegraphing for assistance. From 
General Pease, the receiver of the Indiana, Blooming- 
ton & Western, it was learned that his men would not 
strike as there had been no reduction in pay on his Une for 
over a year; that the men on the Indianapohs, Cincinnati 
& LaFayette, the other road passing through Indianapolis 
and operated by a Federal receiver, would not strike, as 
their pay had not been reduced; and that V. T. Malott, 
then a resident and citizen of Indianapohs and the general 
manager of the Indianapohs, Peru & Chicago Railroad 
Company, had satisfied the men of his company so that 
there would be no strike on that line but there would be 
a strike on the other lines. 

The call for the meeting Monday night and the article 
on the railroad management was discussed by General Har- 
rison, Colonel Hendricks, and my husband, and it was re- 
marked that as there were men among the railroad employees 
who had been soldiers, they might not be lacking in leaders 



384 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

in the event of violence. The strike was all around us but 
had not yet reached Indianapolis itself. 

Captain Arnold, the commandant of the United States 
Arsenal at Indianapolis, said that Federal troops were so 
busily engaged in the North on strike duty or were so scat- 
tered through the South, it would probably be several days 
before any could be sent to IndianapoHs. "But," said 
Judge Gresham, "we have plenty of material for volunteers, 
and Captain Arnold can supply us w4th arms, although he 
is short of ammunition. I have called on the President for 
troops, but have not yet heard from him." 

The next morning the following telegram was received 
from the United States Attorney-General; and it will later 
appear what action Judge Gresham took: 

Washington, D. C, July 24. 
Hon. W. Q. Gresham, 
Indianapolis: - — 
Every effort will be made to sustain the marshal, but the 
troops at the disposal of the Secretary of War are very few indeed 
and I fear that it will not be in the power of the government to 

furnish them at once. 

Charles Devons, 

Attorney-General. 

Meantime, Captain Arnold had been authorized by the 
War Department to use his own discretion in honoring the 
request of the United States Marshal at Indianapohs. 

Many of the Southern newspapers rather sneered at a 
situation that demanded Federal troops in the Northern 
cities and States. They had no strikes in the South, they 
said. 

Monday, July 23, at two o'clock, the firemen and brake- 
men of the Vandaha Line, faihng to come to an adjustment 
with Superintendent Staples, quit work. They soon in- 
duced the firemen on the Indianapolis & St. Louis Line to 
join them. A committee appeared at the Union Depot 
and attempted to induce a fireman on the engine of a 



THE GREAT RAILROAD STRIKE 385 

passenger train just leaving for St. Louis to quit his engine, 
but failed. Warren N. Sayer, the grand secretary and 
treasurer of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, it 
was said headed this committee, but this Sayer denied 
when on trial later for contempt of court in interfering with 
the operation of the trains of the receivers. 

That night, after my husband had adjourned court, he 
had a conference of lawyers, all of whom had seen service 
in the army, and the powers and duty of the Federal judge 
were very carefully canvassed in the premises. One of his 
expressions was, "I know what to do." In this conference 
were General Spooner, the United States Marshal, Gener- 
al Benjamin Harrison, ex-Governor Conrad Baker, and 
Colonel A. W. Hendricks, the last two being law part- 
ners of Thomas A. Hendricks. Governor Baker called 
that evening and was shown the following telegram from 
General J. H. Wilson, receiver of the St. Louis & South- 
eastern Railroad Company, the St. Louis, Evansville & 
Nashville Line: 

The running of freight trains east of St. Louis interrupted 
by organized strikers from other roads. Our employees intim- 
idated and constrained to cease work. Property as yet free from 
violence, but situation serious and may be followed by riotous 
outbreak at an}^ moment by vicious element outside of strikers. 
Local authorities unable or unwilling to protect our men who have 
made no complaint and are willing to work if permitted. Monthly 
payments have been promptly made at rates above the average 
for work of like classes in other avocations; no reductions except 
as to engineers have been made since October last. I have not 
been asked to make concessions and am in the dark as to what 
is expected of me by the mob. Meanwhile, I have seen many 
of my men and advised them to go to their homes and remain 
there until the storm blows over. Have ordered all freight trains 
to turn back from Belleville, to sidetrack freight trains if strike 
spreads, and to suspend all operations until assured of adequate 
protection. Will do all in my power to keep peace and protect 
property in my hands, but the United States marshal with force 



386 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

of Federal troops will be necessary to meet emergency. Your 
instructions will be obser\^ed, but I am unalterably opposed to 
any concession, direct or indirect, to organized violence. The 
other railroad managers here concur in this program; Major 
Wilson also. 

Colonel Baker and my husband agreed it would not 
do to suspend operations; that if the receivers' employees 
would work, the movement of the trains should not be pre- 
vented by mobs, and General Wilson was so advised. It 
was agreed also that the next day the volunteer companies 
should be organized, as my husband said he had not heard 
from the President in response to his call for troops. 

The Monday evening meeting in the State House yards 
was a violent one. When it broke up, the strikers and their 
sympathizers took possession of the Union Depot and made 
it their headquarters. Among trains that were to depart 
at II p. M. was an Indiana, Bloomington & Western train 
for Peoria, Illinois. The strikers said the engine and mail 
car might go but not the baggage, passenger, and sleeping 
cars. These they cut off, and then the receiver abandoned 
the train. The same course was pursued with reference to 
the Indianapolis, Cincinnati & LaFayette train, which 
reached Indianapolis from Cincinnati at midnight to go 
through to LaFayette. All other roads were likewise tied 
up. Many of the strikers were appointed special police- 
men by the mayor. 

On the morning of the 24th, before opening court, there 
was a conference in chambers. Of this conference Charles 
W. Smith of the Indianapolis bar said, years afterwards: 

In the early part of the day- — July 24, 1877 — a messenger 
from Judge Gresham's chambers came to my office and said that 
the judge desired a conference with several gentlemen at once, 
and requested me to attend if possible. 

The judge said to those present: 'The strike is assuming 
dangerous proportions; the Indianapolis, Bloomington & Western 
Railroad Company is in the hands of a receiver appointed by the 



THE GREAT RAILROAD STRIKE 387 

United States Circuit Court. All of you gentlemen have seen 
service in the Civil War. If you are willing to act, to take com- 
mand of the force we can enroll, and support me, I can by reason 
of the power I have as a Federal judge appoint you special United 
States marshals and then move the Indianapolis, Bloomington & 
Western trains. This will break the strike and thus prevent 
bloodshed and destruction of property.' All present expressed 
their willingness to support the court. 

The judge then said that it was time for court to convene, 
but that he was sending out calls to prominent citizens for a meet- 
ing in the courtroom immediately after the noon adjournment 
of court, and requested those present to attend that meeting. 

Before going on the bench Judge Gresham sent the fol- 
lowing telegram to Circuit Judge Thomas Drummond at 
Chicago : 

Strikers are in possession of Union Depot and will not allow 
freight or passenger trains of the Indiana, Bloomington & Western 
and Indianapolis, Cincinnati & LaFayette, or any other roads 
to go out. Have I authority to order marshal to assist the 
receivers and for that purpose accept services of volunteer mili- 
tary companies? Am I limited simply to having marshal arrest 
parties named in writ? I feel like ordering the marshal to clear 
the tracks, and for that purpose accept proffered aid without 
issuing warrants. I understand that Governor Williams and 
Mayor Cavin have determined to do nothing to protect or defend 
the railroads. 

At 10:30 came the answer: 

Judge W. Q. Gresham: — 

Have no doubt of your right to order marshal to protect all 
property in hands of our receivers, and have no doubt of marshal's 
right to call for necessary assistance. I gave orders to marshal 
of Southern District (Illinois) yesterday to have all men who 
interfere identified so far as possible for punishment hereafter. 

Thomas Drummond. 

On the adjournment of court at noon, pursuant to the 
oral notice, a mass meeting was held in the Federal court. 



388 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

Captain Smith was there. Judge Gresham in calling the 
meeting to order said that the community was in possession 
of the mob; that the governor, the mayor and the sheriff, 
whose duty it was to act, were supine; life and property 
were in danger; that society was disintegrating, if it had not 
dissolved. The only method to pursue was to organize a 
Committee of Public Safety and take charge, and to enroll 
a sufficient force of volunteers to command the situation. 
They had plenty of officers, and many more who had served 
in the ranks would enlist. In a short space of time there 
would be all the troops necessary to control the situation, 
and that he was ready to sign his name as the first volunteer. 

W. P. Fishback followed and spoke of having witnessed 
the riot in Chicago the day before and of the great relief 
it was when he saw two companies of regulars marching 
down the street. But Mr. Fishback was apprehensive that 
a force could not be organized quickly enough in Indianapo- 
lis to meet the situation. 

General George H. Chapman, the receiver of the La- 
Fayette, Muncie & Bloomington Railroad Company, a 
member of the bar and the gallant commander of a cavalry 
brigade at Gettysburg, was for the use of force in meeting 
the situation. Said General Chapman: "The basis of all 
government is an implied agreement that the people shall 
pay taxes to perform governmental functions and render 
all personal allegiance and service necessary to that end. 
In consideration thereof, the State pledges itself to main- 
tain peace and order and protect the citizens in their per- 
sonal and property rights." 

Then, Captain Smith sa^-s, "Judge Gresham called upon 
General Harrison as to his judgment. General Harrison 
was emphatic in the statement that order must be main- 
tained, and all attempts at interference with the operation 
of the railroads in violation of law ought to be suppressed." 
But he further stated that he thought it ought to be borne 
in mind that there were two sides to the question; that 



THE GREAT RAILROAD STRIKE 389 

doubtless the railroad employees had just grievances, and 
that no hasty action should be taken. 

William H. English and other large property holders 
were present at the meeting. Mr. English was the spokes- 
man for this class. He had been that morning in confer- 
ence with Mayor Cavin and Governor WilHams; he depre- 
cated the purpose to organize troops; he said that it would 
inflame the strikers, and that while there were many men 
present who had served as generals and colonels and majors 
and captains during the War of the Rebellion, there were 
not many who had served in the ranks; that they would 
not be able to get a full complement of men; that there 
might be much valuable property destroyed, and it would 
be better not to attempt to organize. 

General Chapman at this point broke in with the ques- 
tion: "Mr. English, you are thinking of your property, 
are you?" To which Mr. Enghsh repHed, "I am think- 
ing about my own property. I am thinking about the 
property of other citizens of the city of IndianapoHs, and I 
am also thinking of the possibility that many persons might 
be killed or hurt before order is restored." Again General 
Chapman broke in: "Mr. Enghsh, you are a coward'" 
Mr. Enghsh then concluded his speech, deprecating hasty 
action. 

Colonel Ritter said: "I think the first thing to do is to 
organize in an effective way to protect the public from the 
mob. When we have done that, then we will be in shape 
to talk. Ten thousand men marching down the street with 
hands in empty pockets would accomphsh nothing with an 
excited and violent mob. I move that we organize a miH- 
tary company, select officers, ask for arms and ammunition 
from the United States, and then try to persuade these wild 
men to disperse ; if they refuse, and resort to destruction of 
property, our organization will be ready for such duty as 
may be necessary." Colonel Ritter, who was a Prohibi- 
tionist in politics, afterwards said, "You always knew 



390 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

where Judge Gresham stood. I made my motion to end 
the debate." 

On the adoption of Colonel Ritter's motion the meeting 
proceeded to effect a military organization. The enroll- 
ment of troops began, and in less than an hour after the 
adjournment of court (before 2 o'clock) the first com- 
pany had two hundred members, two-thirds of whom had 
served during the War of the Rebellion. It was divided 
into two companies, General Harrison taking the command 
of one, with Colonel Ritter his first lieutenant ; and General 
Chapman of the other, with Captain C. W. Smith his first 
lieutenant. General Chapman went on the Committee of 
Public Safety, and Captain Smith managed his company, 
as well as the enrollment and immediate organization of the 
two companies, right in the courtroom. 

The Committee of Public Safety was composed of 
T. A. Morris, Benjamin Harrison, John Lx)ve, Joseph E. 
MacDonald, Conrad Baker, George H. Chapman, and A. W. 
Hendricks. Joseph E. MacDonald was the only member of 
the committee who was without practical experience in mili- 
tary affairs. My husband agreed that he would take no 
action as a Federal judge in an administrative capacity that 
did not first have the approval of this committee. 

By the time the meeting adjourned. Captain Arnold 
was at the rear of the post-office building, with wagons 
loaded with muskets and enough ammunition to arm the 
companies of Generals Harrison and Chapman. Captain 
Arnold was in one of his old faded citizen's suits of clothes, 
and his wagons were covered with tarpaulins, so that there 
was nothing to disclose what he was conveying from the 
Arsenal to the Federal buildings, but it was remarked that 
he could not conceal his decided military bearing. 

In all, nine companies were ultimately organized, com- 
manded by men who had seen service during the War of 
the Rebellion. These, supplemented by the Indianapolis 
Light Infantry and the Montgomery Guards of Crawfords- 



THE GREAT RAILROAD STRIKE 391 

ville, commanded by General Lew Wallace, made ample 
force. General Daniel Macauley was placed in command 
of all, with headquarters in the Federal building, which was 
also the headquarters of the Committee of Public Safety. 
After the meeting at the Federal courtroom adjourned, 
there was a meeting at the office of the Governor of Indiana, 
which was attended by Governor Williams, Mayor Gavin, 
Judge Gresham, Senator MacDonald, General John Love, 
Colonel B. C. Shaw, ex-Governor Conrad Baker, Captain 
D. W. Wiles, Adjutant-General Russ, and others. Mean- 
while the soldier element among the railroad men had been 
quietly advised of the companies that had been organized. 
Considerate then as always of State and local authorities. 
Judge Gresham insisted before action was taken that the 
situation be put up to Governor WilHams and Mayor 
Gavin. Though all agreed there was danger of the destruc- 
tion of property, neither the Governor nor the Mayor could be 
induced to take any action. The Mayor claimed the strik- 
ing railroad men would not resort to violence; that he had 
appointed many of them special poHcemen. and that they 
could and would suppress the vicious element which might 
appear. The Governor claimed he could not call out any 
State troops unless a request for them was made by the 
Mayor, while the adjutant-general said there were not 
enough State troops to command the situation if called out. 
Thereupon the Governor and the Mayor were informed 
that the Committee of PubHc Safety had organized two 
companies of veterans who would support the United States 
marshal in moving the trains operated by the receivers and 
clear all the tracks if desired. Both the Governor and the 
Mayor deprecated such action, as sure to lead to violence. 
Both, especially Mayor Gavin, deprecated sending General 
Spooner alone, in his official capacity, to the strikers' head- 
quarters at the Union Depot to notify them that they were 
in contempt of court, that he had come to move the receivers' 
trains, and to do so would use all the force necessary. The 



392 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

reason Mayor Cavin gave was that such action would most 
likely result in bodily harm to General Spooner. In this 
state of affairs the meeting adjourned. The Mayor then 
issued a call for a public meeting to be held that evening at 
8 o'clock at the front of the courthouse, on Washington 
Street. There was a large gathering, at which it was de- 
cided there should be organized a committee of mediation, 
to endeavor to bring about a settlement between the em- 
ployees and the railroads. Mayor Cavin, Senator Mac Don- 
ald, ex-Governor Baker, General Benjamin Harrison, Albert 
G. Porter, and others were on this committee. It had a 
number of conferences with the committee representing the 
strikers, and it was this committee that subsequently took 
the testimony as to wages that I have heretofore quoted. 
Upon the adjournment of the meeting in the Governor's 
office, it was still early in the afternoon. There was a 
meeting of the Committee of Public Safety in the chambers 
of the District Judge in the post-office building. The 
question of the power of the Federal courts was very 
carefully considered, as was the attitude of the Governor, 
and of the Mayor. The following telegram from C. M 
Osborne, an eminent attorney of Rock Island, received 
attention : 

I learn that strikers on other roads at Terre Haute refuse 
to let trains run on Logansport, Crawfordsville & Southwestern 
Railway. I have advised the receiver, subject to your approval, 
to discharge all men not necessary to take charge of property, 
and explain to them that he would have no money to pay them 
if he keeps them, and will re-employ when he can make earnings. 
Please advise him direct and protect the property. 

My husband told the committee he would order Clay- 
brook, the receiver of Mr. Osborne's road at Terre Haute, 
to discharge no men, but on the contrary to hold his trains 
in readiness to move when he received the necessary assist- 
ance; and advise the strike leaders they were in contempt 



THE GREAT RAILROAD STRIKE 393 

of the Federal courts and would be punished if they con- 
tinued to interfere. The Committee of Public Safety said 
it would aid the marshal in the enforcement of any order 
he might receive. Immediately General Spooner was or- 
dered to go alone to the depot and notify the strikers who 
he was, that they were in contempt of court, and that he 
had come to move the trains of the receivers, using all neces- 
sary force. Although Mayor Cavin came to my husband 
and urged him not to send the marshal to the depot to move 
the trains of the receivers, as it would lead to violence, 
General Spooner went alone. Upon making known his 
position and instructions, the strike leaders promptly said 
they would no longer interfere with the roads operated by 
the receivers, and in thirty minutes one of the trains, that 
had been held for fifteen hours, was on its way to Lafayette. 

But the embargo was kept up on the other roads ; and as 
there was practically no ammunition at the Arsenal, the 
Committee of PubHc Safety was cautious about attempting 
to move until ammunition was received from Chicago. 
In the evening, after consulting with Captain Arnold, Gen- 
eral Harrison's company was moved to the Arsenal to pro- 
tect it, and as a suitable place from which to operate in case 
of emergency; while General Chapman's company remained 
at the post-office building, camping in the courtroom and 
the various offices. 

On the 25th the Committee of Public Safety was awaiting 
the arrival of ammunition from Chicago, and my husband 
was awaiting the coming of the Federal troops that had 
been promised. Meanwhile different methods of procedure 
were canvassed. The Governor and the Mayor were still 
holding off, while Senator MacDonald was importuning the 
Governor to act. It was a situation to be dealt with by the 
executive arm of the government, which could act, as those 
men thought, only through the army and the poKce. Writs 
of assistance and the jurisdiction of the Federal courts 
were canvassed, but the thought of a bill in equity of the 



394 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

United States government against the strikers was not con- 
sidered the way to meet the situation. 

On July 26, Judge Gresham received telegrams and 
letters, which, with his answers, follow: 

A mob last night at Evansville tried to prevent the orderly- 
departure of my trains. No railroad employees took part. I 
shall prepare affidavits. Meanwhile can't you do as much for 
me as you have done for the I. B. W? 

J. H. Wilson, Receiver. 

General J. H. Wilson, Receiver, July 26, 1877. 

St. Louis: — 
Ask the mayor of Evansville for all necessary protection. 

W. Q. Gresham. 

St. Louis, Mo., July 26. 
To W. Q. Gresham: 

Evansville authorities have already been called upon to 
arrest lawless persons, but decline for fear of adding to the excite- 
ment. If there is a man of courage there, have him appointed 
special deputy marshal. I suggest Denby. How are you mak- 
ing it at Indianapolis? 

J. H. Wilson. 

Indianapolis, July 26, 1877. 
To the Mayor of the City of Evansville: 

General J. H. Wilson, receiver of the St. Louis & South- 
eastern Railroad, telegraphs that he is obstructed at Evansville 
in the operation of his road. Will you aid and protect him as 
receiver in the management of the road, and save me the necessity 
of sending the marshal with a posse for that purpose? 

W. Q. Gresham, Judge, United States Court. 

Evansville, July 27, 1877. 
To Hon. W. Q. Gresham, 
United States Judge, 

Indianapolis: — 
While you are asking the people of Evansville to protect the 
St. Louis &' Southeastern Road, General Wilson, the receiver. 



THE GREAT RAILROAD STRIKE 395 

has suppressed our papers by stopping their sale on his trains. 
It is not surprising that strikes occur on roads so managed. 

F. M. Thayer, Editor ''Journal.'" 

Indianapolis, Julv 27, 1S77. 
To F. M. Thayer 
Evansville: — 
You will learn very soon that there is power enough in this 
government to mn that road whether Evansville supports Gen- 
eral Wilson or not. It would have been more respectful in your 
mayor to have answered my dispatch than to inspire the sending 
of such a telegram as yours. Under the circumstances, General 
Wilson may properly exercise his discretion in exckiding from his 
trains such papers as he may think tend to ferment the present 
disturbance. So far as it is known to the court, General Wilson's 

conduct is approved. 

W. 0. Gresham. 

Evansville, July 27. 
Hon. W. Q. Gresham, 
Indianapolis :■ — 
Will reply to your telegram by letter. Am not responsible 
for the mayor, and have had no communication with him. 

F. M. Thayer. 

Evansville, July 27, 1877. 
Hon. W. Q. Gresham, 
Indianapolis, Ind. 

Sir: — If the wording of my dispatch this morning gave offense 
I ask pardon, for I had no intention of the kind. In intimating, 
however, that Mayor Kleiner inspired the dispatch, I am sure 
you administered punishment disproportionate to the offense. 
To my mind it is a clear case wherein you failed to temper justice 
with mercy. I have nothing whatever to do with Mayor Kleiner. 
Have not spoken to him for weeks. 

But to the other point: This morning, after all our orders 
for papers on the Southeastern road had been filled, and without 
warning or provocation so far as I can learn, General Wilson for- 
bade their coming on the train. We are still without explanation 



396 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

for this strange conduct. Evansville, I am sure, is not popular 
with Genera] Wilson, but I cannot imagine what the Journal has 
done to excite his ire. If it has been decided to stop the sale of 
newspapers on all roads run by government receivers we will 
submit without complaint. If our paper has done anything to 
excite the mob against the Southeastern or any other road, I am 
not aware of it. So far from this, we never have taken sides 
against the road in any of its controversies or litigation with our 
people. I only ask to have our paper treated precisely as govern- 
ment receivers are treating other papers throughout the country, 
unless it can be shown we are, exceptionally, trying to inflame the 
mob spirit. I am sure on reflection that you will concede this is 
not asking too much. Railroad employees have acted badly in 
various parts of the country, but is n't it possible that railroad 
managers now and then commit a mistake ? We well understand 
that General Wilson has the power to exclude our paper from his 
trains except as it goes through the mail, and we will have to sub- 
mit, but I am sure such petty tyranny will not insure the advan- 
tage of the road in the long run. 

Respectfully, 

F. M. Thayer. 

Evansville, Ind., July 27. 
To Judge W. Q. Gresham: 

On receipt of your request, Mayor Kleiner sent detail of 
police here yesterda}' and dispersed the few men who claim to 
be strikers. Work has been done since with no interference and 
I think the men have left town. Everything tranquil as could 
be desired. 

O. M. Shepard, Supt. S. E. Ry. 

Indianapolis, July 28, 1877. 
F. M. Thayer, Esq.. 

Evansville, Ind. 
Dear Sir: — 

Your note of the 27th is just received. I regret the unpleas- 
ant complication. The dispatch I sent Mayor Kleiner was 
cautiously expressed and was due to him as an official. I think 
he owed me an answer, and, having waited twenty-four hours, 



THE GREAT RAILROAD STRIKE 397 

all 1 heard was by means of your dispatch. I will ask you if 
from the tenor of this dispatch 1 had not the right to assume 
that the mayor had advised you of its contents? And was it 
not, to say the least, considering the embarrassment of the 
occasion, somewhat unreasonable that you should use language 
so very like a sneer at the exercise of the authority of the 
courts ? 

Now I wish to express freely my conviction that the mayor 
of Evansville has done his duty, and my belief that the citizens 
of Evansville sustained him in this performance. I am sorry- 
that any unfriendly expression toward the mayor or you were 
employed in my dispatch. 

As to the papers, of course General Wilson, unless there 
were urgent reasons, ought not to reject your papers or any other 
newspapers from his trains. I have been in communication with 
him and he telegraphs me that he had instructed the superintend- 
ent to exclude newsboys and newspapers from the trains as cir- 
culating intelligence that would tend to spread the strike. The 
order was not directed at your ijaper more than at any other, and 
therefore conveys no imputation on the Journal. As none was 
deserved I am glad none was made. I must also say that General 
Wilson is incapable of any unfriendly feeling toward the city of 
Evansville or of any act of injustice toward you, and that he 
had no thought or desire but to operate his road for the public 
benefit. I think you will find no further hindrance in your busi- 
ness on this account. 

As an act of justice to Mayor Kleiner and your paper you 
may feel free to publish this letter if you think best. 

V^ery respectfully. 

W. Q. Gresham. 

Mr. Thayer subsequently published the entire corres- 
pondence. 

On the afternoon of the 27th the Federal troops, with 
General Morrow in command, arrived from the vSouth. 
There were several hundred of them. Contemporaneously 
with their arrival came the following telegram from Attor- 
ney-General Devons: 
26 



398 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

Washington, D. C, July 27. 
To Judge Gresham, U. S. Judge: 

My object was to have the writ of assistance executed first. 
If you think the time has arrived for the arrest of those who have 
interfered to prevent the execution, let the marshal act at once. 
There are no other strikers, I suppose, subject to United States 
process. 

Chas. Devons, Attorney-General. 

That afternoon Warren N. Sayer, and others who had 
interfered with the receivers' trains, were arrested by United 
States marshals, although the Mayor protested against 
the act. Governor Williams was finally prevailed on to 
telegraph the President for Federal troops, but it was given 
out at the White House that his request was so worded 
that it could not be recognized. Still later in the day the 
Governor received the troops of the Committee of Public 
Safety into the service of the State, with General Daniel 
Macauley, their commander, as a brigadier-general. After 
the trouble was all over, the city council of Indianapolis 
made an appropriation and reimbursed the State for the pay 
of these troops. 

The arrival of the Federal troops, the arrest of Sayer and 
of his associates, and the Governor's action in taking the 
volunteer companies into the service of the State, ended 
the blockade at Indianapolis, but the strikers continued in 
possession of Terre Haute and Vincennes, and refused to 
allow the operation of the roads of the receivers at these 
points. Vincennes was a central point between St. Louis 
and Cincinnati on the Ohio & Mississippi Road. 

On Saturday, July 28, General Spooner was sent with 
fifty men of the Third United States Infantry and four 
officers to open the Logansport, Crawfordsville & South- 
western Road at Terre Haute and the Ohio & Mississippi 
Road at Vincennes, and to arrest those at Vincennes and 
Terre Haute who had obstructed the roads. The trains 
of the Logansport, Crawfordsville & Southwestern were 



THE GREAT RAILROAD STRIKE 399 

released by the strikers at the Union Depot at Terre Haute 
when they got word that General Spooner and the troops 
would soon arrive at Terre Haute. 

On the morning of the 2Qth General Spooner reported 
that the strikers fled as he approached Vincennes, and that 
he had declined to remain at Terre Haute longer than two 
hours although the citizens there apprehended serious 
trouble. At the same time there came the following tele- 
gram from W. R. A/IcKeen, president of the Vandaha Line: 

Engineers refuse to run our trains. Strikers are turbulent 
and men who desire to work intimidated. I trust you will let 
the United States soldiers remain here a few days. Please 
answer. 

General Ben. Spooner, 

U. S. Marshal, Vincennes, Ind. 

You can appoint a deputy at Terre Haute to take charge 
of your posse. The posse will remain at Terre Haute and aid 
Claybrook if necessary. The. presence of the troops at Terre 
Haute will have a good moral effect and they will be convenient 
for use at Vincennes or Evansville. If the Vandalia strikers 
think the troops are to operate against them you will not be 
responsible for their mistake. Appoint as few deputies at Vin- 
cennes as possible. 

Make provision for the troops l^efore you leave them. 

W. Q. Gresham. 



Dear General:' 

Please copy this and get it off quick. 



W. 0. G. 



Upon receipt of this telegram General Spooner returned 
to Terre Haute. By the time he and the fifty Federal sol- 
diers reached Terre Haute the depot was in the possession 
of four thousand men. There stood the United States mail 

1 General Daniel Macauley, then in the service of the State. His headquarters con- 
tinued in the Federal building. 



400 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN G RE SHAM 

trains from St. Louis to New York "coupled up" to Van- 
dalia engines manned by master mechanics in the place of 
engineers. General Spooner escorted the first of these mail 
trains, No. 20, out of the Terre Haute depot and out of 
town, under orders to shoot the first man who attempted 
to interfere. Then the engineers and Mr. McKeen, the 
president of the Vandaha Company, promptly adjusted 
their differences and the strike was ended at Terre Haute, 
so far as the Federal courts were concerned. That night 
General Spooner and the troops returned to Indianapolis. 
He reported that there were cars in No. 20 with the words 
"Fast United States Mail" printed on the sides and sacks 
of mail inside. He considered it his duty, in view of Presi- 
dent Hayes' proclamation, the Judge's telegrams, his author- 
ity as United States Marshal, and his practical experi- 
ence as a man, to move that mail train and report results. 
The legal lights at IndianapoUs, including the Judge, said 
he did right. In legal abihty Benjamin Spooner was not 
inferior to his brother Philip, w^ho ranked as one of the best 
legal minds the Wisconsin bar produced; nor to his nephew, 
John C. Spooner, afterwards United States Senator from 
that State, and one of the leading lawyers of the nation. 
Finally, at Governor Wilhams's instance, Federal troops 
were sent to Fort Wayne. 

On the 29th Judge Gresham telegraphed the attorney- 
general and Judge Drummond that the roads in Indiana 
were all open, and that the authorities had arrested some of 
the strikers and were after a few more. The attorney - 
general was asked by telegraph how he thought the prisoners 
were to be treated, and Judge Drummond as to whether or 
not they were to be admitted to bail; if so, in what amount. 
"If the evidence sustained the charge of contempt, can you 
give some general idea as to what would be adequate 
punishment?" 

That night the following telegram was received from the 
attorney-general : 



T^HE GREAT RAILROAD STRIKE 401 

The prisoners in question are prisoners of civil authority 
and the expense of keeping them a proper charge on the judiciary 
fund. The marshal must take care of and feed them until their 
cases can be disposed of, which I suppose will be promptly. If 
any danger of rescue, military will aid him if necessary. 

The next morning Judge Drummond answered: 

They are to be treated just as others guilty of contempt 
of court; they have a right to purge the contempt, and if time is 
given them for hearing they must give ample bail to render their 
appearance certain. I have eight here this morning, arrested 
in Peoria. If guilty, I intend to punish them by imprisonment, 
so that there will not be likely to be any interference soon again. 
Bail ought to be from $1,500 to $2,500 and first class. My 
notion is about $2,000. 

The men then in jail were promptly admitted to bail. 
Having taken part as a member of the Committee of 
Public Safety in organizing the volunteer troops, Judge 
Gresham said he should not sit as a judge in the con- 
tempt proceedings. 



26 a 



CHAPTER XXIV 
TRIALS FOR CONTEMPT OF COURT 



JUDGE DRUMMOND TAKES UP OHIO & MISSISSIPPI LINE 

CASES FIRST — THE TERRE HAUTE CASES CONTROVERSY 

OVER WARREN N. SAYER — PUNISHMENT OF THE STRIKERS. 

AUGUST, 2, 1877, Judge Drummond began the hear- 
ings in Indianapohs of the cases of the men charged 
with contempt. Before proceeding he said: 

It is proper for the court, inasmuch as I came from Chicago 
last night after having had an examination of some of the rioters 
in IlHnois, for the purpose of being present at the examination of 
persons who are charged with hke wrongful acts here, to explain 
why I have come; otherwise I probably should not have come at 
this time. I understand that my brother judge has, during the 
course of the excitement that has occurred here, taken a rather 
active part as a citizen, and as a good citizen, I believe, in aiding 
to put a stop to the contemplated or actual riots that were exist- 
ing. Under these circumstances he has felt a desire that I should 
be present and that I should take the responsibility in the exam- 
ination of the parties who are brought before the court. I, of 
course, am perfectly willing to do so, although I think it nothing 
more than fair to state that I also, as circuit judge of this circuit, 
have taken a very active part in doing what I could in my official 
capacity to put down this mob. I have simply done it as a part 
of my official duty as judge of the United States Court. I have 
taken no active part individually in any of the meetings that 
have occurred throughout the community, but I have taken a 
very active part, I believe, as a judge in doing all that was in my 
power officially to put an end to the state of affairs that existed 
throughout the country, and I shall always feel it my duty to do 
so whenever a similar state of affairs exist. I am now ready to 
proceed. 

402 



TRIALS FOR CONTEMPT OF COURT 403 

The cases against the Ohio & Mississippi strikers were 
taken up first. General Harrison and C. K. Beecher ap- 
peared against them. After the affidavits had been read, 
showing how the accused had interfered with the movement 
of trains at Vincennes, they announced they were without 
counsel. Judge Drummond then adjourned the hearing and 
appointed W. W. Herod and Ferdinand Winter as their coun- 
sel. At a subsequent hearing, under the advice of counsel, 
Wentworth, Lovejoy, and Bainsy came into court and plead 
guilty, but asked for clemency as they claimed they did 
not know the Ohio & Mississippi Railroad was operated by 
a receiver. Reeves, the other Ohio & Mississippi striker, 
went to trial, and when he became a witness in his behalf, 
although vigorously prosecuted and cross-examined by Gen- 
eral Harrison in an endeavor to show that he had said if 
there was any fighting to be done he would aid the strikers, 
Judge Drummond decided there was not enough evidence 
to hold him for contempt, but he said he would excuse him 
when he could give security for his good behavior in the 
future. 

The hearing of those who interfered with the Indiana, 
Bloomington & Western, the Indianapolis, Cincinnati & 
Lafayette and the Logansport, Crawfordsville & South- 
western consumed the second and third days. Albert G. 
Porter of the Indianapolis bar, and Judge Carlton and 
General Charles Cruft, of the Terre Haute bar, appeared 
for the strikers, while Charles W. Fairbanks, Major Jona- 
than W. Gordon, and Charles Osborne prosecuted on be- 
half of the receivers. The receivers, their superintendent, 
and many of their employees were witnesses to establish 
the interference with the movement of the trains. W. R. 
McKeen, president of the Vandalia Company, told how 
the union depot at Terre Haute, which his company owned 
and from which the trains of the receivers of the road to 
Logansport were operated, was in the possession of the 
strikers from Tuesday until Saturday; that no trains were 



404 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

allowed during that period to arrive or depart from the 
depot; that the strikers' committee, Mark Miller, Charles 
Watson, E. R. Nesbit, Daniel Murphy, and Henry Mc- 
Intire, were in charge of the mob. Mr. McKeen pro- 
duced the following note that he had received from this 
committee : 

Let engine and baggage car go, provided they take no 
passengers. Committee. 

Judge Drummond interrupted an explanation of the 
counsel that the defendants meant no violence: 

Oh, we understand that this mob did n't want anybody to 
break the law except themselves. 

To meet the claims of the defendants that they did not 
know the road was operated by a receiver, Receiver Clay- 
brook testified he met the committee on Wednesday, the 
25th day of July, and showed all its members telegrams 
from Judge Gresham that the road was operated by him, 
Claybrook, as a receiver appointed by the United States 
courts; that they were in contempt of court and would be 
punished if they longer continued to prevent the court 
from operating its trains, and that a mail train consisted of 
baggage, express, and passenger cars as well as mail cars. 

But the greatest controversy was in the case of Warren 
N. Sayer, secretary of the Firemen's Brotherhood. It de- 
veloped, according to some of the witnesses who testified 
for the receivers, that Sayer was at the Union Depot in 
Indianapolis on Monday the 23d at 2 p. m., before the 
strike began, talking to men there on the train, that he told 
a police officer, "It is our business to get the trainmen to 
leave if we can." Charles Manning, the marshal at the 
Union Depot, said Sayer was there all the week. "I sent 
to Sayer, Thursday, a passenger who wanted to be allowed 
to go home. He came back swearing that the men (the 
crowd in which Sayer was) wouldn't let him go home." 



TRIALS FOR CONTEMPT OF COURT 405 

Many other witnesses testified that Sayer was constantly 
about the Union Depot with the committee that was in 
charge. The members of the committee were identified by 
the white ribbons they wore. WilHam Young, a ' ' hostler ' ' of 
the Indiana, Bloomington & Western, a receivers' train, 
testified that on Tuesday morning at 6 o'clock, when back- 
ing a train into the depot, he was ordered by one of the 
committee into a siding. There was a big crowd of rail- 
road men and others present. "Sayer came up on the cab 
of my engine and told me to pull in on the sidetrack or I 
would get into trouble. I did so. I went into the switch on 
Sayer's order." 

Captain W. D. Miles, chairman of the pohce board, 
testified that he saw Sayer Wednesday afternoon as he 
was going to a meeting of the Citizens' Committee; that 
Sayer was at the head of a body of 150 strikers; that he told 
Sayer that they were going too far and must be stopped. 
He asked in what way. "I told him he was breaking the 
law, and the authorities had put up with it as long as they 
could. He said: 'We are acting under the instructions 
of your governor and mayor.' I told him he must be 
mistaken; that they never gave him permission to use 
private property, cut trains, etc. He made no answer. 
Thursday, at the Citizens' meeting in the Council Chamber, 
I introduced Mr. Evans, agent of Cole's Circus, to Sayer, 
he having been sent to Sayer by Mr. Malott, manager of 
the Peru Railroad. Mr. Sayer asked me why I sent that 
man to him; that he had nothing to do with the matter. 
I told him if he had nothing to do with it, I did not know 
who did." 

Sayer, who was secretary and treasurer of the Brother- 
hood of Locomotive Firemen, which as an organization was 
not involved in the strike, denied he was at the Union 
Depot at 2 o'clock on Monday the 23d and at 6 a. m. on 
Tuesday when Young, the Indiana, Bloomington & Western 
"hostler," said Sayer ordered him into the siding with the 



4o6 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

Indiana, Bloomington & Western train. And in support of 
an alibi as against Young's statement, Sayer produced wit- 
nesses who testified that he was at 6 a. m. Tuesday morning 
at home in bed. He testified further that he had counseled 
peaceable measures and remained about the depot at the 
request of Mayor Cavin. He was at the Spencer House 
on Tuesday when General Spooner instructed the railroad 
men in regard to the roads under the United States courts. 
Senator MacDonald, of the Citizens' Committee, testified 
that Sayer had been an advocate of peace in all his inter- 
course with him. Mayor Cavin as a witness was a partisan 
of Sayer. He testified he had seen Sayer the Friday the 
strike began, with a view to learning what he could of the 
probable action of the man, as he then considered a strike 
inevitable. Sayer, he said, assured him there would be no 
violence and the men would only use lawful means. ' ' From 
that time on I was in almost daily consultation with him, 
and at all times and to all persons in my presence, and 
elsewhere as I have learned, he counseled peace and ob- 
servance of the law." 

Judge Gresham was a spectator in court and took a 
hand in cross-examining the Mayor. In response to Judge 
Gresham's questions the Mayor said: 

Sayer at all times was opposed to the stoppage of trains and 
did what he could to secure their passage, and did succeed. I 
never told Governor Williams and others that if General Spooner 
was sent down to the depot to arrest the men, he would be torn 
to pieces quicker than you [Judge Gresham] could draw your 
breath. I did say that all it would be necessary to do would be 
to send General S^aooner with an order over there and the trains 
would be moved. I do not think that Sayer claimed to represent 
anybody in the conversation I had with him. He was talking 
for himself. The trouble we talked about was the burning and 
destruction of property, not the interference with trains. At 
the time the railroad men were sworn in as policemen, Tuesday, 
four days after Sayer had told me the strike would be here, no 
other extra policemen had been sworn in. 



TRIALS FOR CONTEMPT OF COURT 407 

To Judge Dmmmond Judge Gresham said: "Mayor 
Cavin is not candid in his testimony as to what he said 
to Governor WilHams and myself about sending General 
Spooner to the depot." That Judge Gresham thought 
Sayer was guilty under the evidence, he did not conceal. 
He felt free to express his personal views as a partisan, as 
he was not the judge. He never wanted power for the mere 
gratification of exercising it, and never would exercise it nor 
any judicial function where his feeHngs might be a factor m 
influencing his decision. During most of the days of the 
hearings, as was usually the case when Judge Drummond 
came to IndianapoHs, he was a guest at our house, but 
during this time my husband avoided mentioning the vSayer 
or the other cases to Judge Drummond until they were 
disposed of. 

"I hardly think the testimony in the case of Warren N. 
Sayer is sufficient to warrant the court punishing him for 
contempt," said Judge Drummond in disposing of the case. 
Then he proceeded: 

"Sitting as a court without a jury, with no appeal, the 
court is loath to punish for contempt except in a case of the 
clearest evidence. Whether or not the court would be 
justified in punishing Sayer for contempt in interfering with 
the operations of a road intrusted to the custody of the 
court, by endeavoring to persuade employees who were 
satisfied to leave the service of the receiver and thus inter- 
fere with the functions of the court, is not a charge here 
made, and I will express no opinion upon that question. 
And while the evidence is not clear enough to justify the 
court in punishing Sayer, I think his conduct is such as to 
require him to enter into a recognizance with the court for 
his good behavior for a year." 

The other strikers were punished by being sentenced to 
imprisonment in jail for a period of from thirty days to six 
months, with the understanding that application might be 
made by them to the district judge for their release. Th^ 



4o8 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

evidence was clear that they had participated in actual 
violence. Before the period of their imprisonments expired 
they asked for clemency and were released. 

In a letter written on the 6th of August to his former 
law partner, my husband said, "I wish Grant had been 
President; yet I think President Hayes has done his duty 
in this emergency." The strike of 1877 brought my hus- 
band, as it did many others, back to General Grant as a 
desirable man for the Presidency. Thomas A. Hendricks 
was silent as he always was about such matters, but later 
gave his assent to what was done, while Senator MacDonald 
said that many of his ideas as to the functions of the State 
and National government had been practically changed by 
what he had witnessed. 

In the next chapter, though out of the chronological 
order, I will tell of two other strikes, as they will illustrate 
Walter Q. Gresham's views as a judge and as an executive. 



CHAPTER XXV 
BURLINGTON STRIKE AND DEBS'S REBELLION 



STRIKE VOTED ON THE BURLINGTON ROAD — OTHER 
ROADS REFUSE BURLINGTON's FREIGHT — RECEIVER OF 
WABASH COMPANY INVOLVED — INTERPRETATION OF INTER- 
STATE COMMERCE ACT — GENERAL STRIKE AVOIDED — 
AMENDMENT OF INTERSTATE COMMERCE ACT — PULLMAN 
STRIKE, OR "dEBS's REBELLION" — INTERFERENCE WITH 
MAIL TRAINS — CLEVELAND'S PROCLAMATION AND MILES's 
PROMPT ACTION SUPPRESS DISORDER. 

/^N the 14th of February, 1888, a committee of engi- 
^-^ neers and firemen on the Chicago, BurHngton & 
Quincy Railroad called on the general managers of that 
road and asked for an adjustment of the wage scale. 
What they particularly desired was that the engineers 
and firemen be paid a uniform wage on a mileage basis. 
The claim was partly based on the fact that other roads — 
90 per cent of the railroads of the country, the men claimed 
— had adopted that system. 

At this time the Wabash Railroad east of the Mississ- 
ippi River was operated by a receiver appointed by Circuit 
Judge Gresham. General John McNulta was that receiver. 
A committee of engineers had waited on him with demands, 
the greater part of which he was able to satisfy them he could 
not meet in view of the repairs and rehabilitation work that 
it was absolutely necessary to have done out of earnings, 
the only source available for the purpose. They were not 
heard of again until the strike began on the "Q." 

The Burlington management claimed that the old and 
experienced engineer should be paid more than the man who 
had just been promoted from the position of fireman; that 

409 



4IO LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

an engineer of an engine hauling a train of twenty or thirty 
cars should be paid more than an engineer of an engine 
hauling but two or three cars; that the management should 
be the judge as to which engineer should be paid the most, 
and that on the branch lines men should receive less than 
on the main line. The men and the general manager of 
the company could not agree. 

P. M. Arthur, the chief of the engineers, and F. P. Sar- 
geant, the chief of the firemen, were called to Chicago to 
adjust the trouble. They failed, and gave their consent to 
the men quitting if they so decided. 

The men voted to strike. Again the matter was brought 
to the managers of the Burlington system, and again no 
agreement was reached. 

Thereupon, on the 23d day of February, Messrs. Arthur 
and Sargeant joined in a telegram to C. E. Perkins, the 
president of the Burlington system at Boston, that they 
had been unable to adjust the grievances of the engineers 
and firemen with General Manager Stone, that the men 
were determined to strike, that they wanted to prevent it 
and would accept terms made with the Alton and the 
Santa Fe, namely, three and one-half cents per mile for 
passenger engineers, four cents for freight engineers, and 
sixty per cent of this for the firemen. 

On the 24th, Mr. Perkins rephed to this telegram, as 
follows : 

At this distance and without knowing more than I do about 
the merits of the grievances complained of, it is impossible for 
me to have definite opinions or to give definite orders. The whole 
question has necessarily been left, therefore, in the hands of 
Mr. Stone, to whom T wrote you would show your telegram and 
this reply. The Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad is ready 
and expects to pay at least as good wages as are paid by its neigh- 
bors, but the railroad situation is not such as to justify any general 
increase at present, and I fear an attempt to force it would only 
aggravate the situation. I have felt and still feel confident that 
a way can be found for satisfactorily adjusting any real grievances 



THE BURLINGTON STRIKE 411 

which may have grown up since matters were settled two years 
ago, and I hope for all concerned that nothing will be done hastily. 
I hope to be in Chicago next week. 

The following day, Sunday, at 1 1 o'clock, Hodge and 
Murphy of the Engineer's Grievance Committee called on 
Mr. Stone in his office, presented the telegram of Mr. Per- 
kins, and asked a conference, stating if it or the terms 
previously asked were not granted, the strike would be 
inaugurated at 4 a. m. the next morning. 

Mr. Stone and his associates, among whom was Paul 
Morton, afterwards Secretary of the Navy under President 
Roosevelt, promptly and with scant courtesy, as it was said 
at the time, informed Messrs. Hodge and Murphy that they 
had previously received their answer and there would be no 
conference. At 4 a. m. the next day, the 27th, the strike 
began. That both sides were hasty is apparent. That 
both desired the contest was well understood at the time. 
The men felt they were strong in that they could force the 
connecting lines and roads operating in the same territory 
as the Burlington to refuse to interchange traffic with the 
Burlington; while the Burlington management had assur- 
ances that the Knights of Labor would furnish all the 
engineers necessary to man the Burlington engines in the 
event of the strike. A short time before the engineers of 
the latter order had inaugurated a strike on the Reading 
Railroad and their places had been taken by engineers who 
were members of the Brotherhood of Engineers, the order 
to which the Burlington engineers belonged. 

President Perkins of the Burlington road arrived in 
Chicago three hours after the strike began. He stopped 
at the Grand Pacific Hotel where Messrs. Arthur and 
Sargeant maintained the strike headquarters. He not un- 
justly complained that in view of his telegram the strikers 
had acted hastily. They answered that as he stated his 
coming was indefinite and had referred them to General 
Manager Stone, Mr. Stone's answer was an ultimatum. 



412 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

At first, before the Knights of Labor engineers got to 
work, traffic was completely suspended on the Burlington. 
The managements of most of the railroads running west 
from Chicago — competitors of the Burlington — promptly 
announced they would adopt a policy of neutraHty between 
the Burlington and its striking employees. The Chicago & 
Alton, the Rock Island, and the Santa Fe Lines went further; 
they said they would not honor tickets good for passage 
over their lines and sold by the Burlington since the begin- 
ning of the strike. Up to that time the Burlington was the 
most popular line between Chicago and Omaha and Denver. 

The refusal of the roads to receive freight from the Bur- 
lington was based on the clause of the Interstate Commerce 
Act which required all common carriers to afford facilities 
for the exchange of traffic according to their prospective 
powers. As the Rock Island management put it: 

It will not suspend the operation of its entire line and inflict 
irreparable injury upon the communities dependent upon it for 
transportation because circumstances render it impossible for it 
to exchange traffic with another railroad company. 

They also set forth that the Interstate Commerce Act 
only imposed a penalty "when the corporation wilfully do 
so or cause to be done or shall wilfully suffer or permit the 
acts complained of to be done," therefore, they said, they 
were not acting wilfully when they were refusing all inter- 
changing traffic with the Burlington under threats of their 
own employees to strike. 

Other railroad men took the position that if Receiver 
McNulta of the Wabash, an officer of the United States 
Court and a lawyer, could afford to ignore Sections Three 
and Seven of the Interstate Act, they ran no risk in taking 
the same position. General McNulta stated that he in- 
tended to render strict obedience to the law, but that in 
order to preserve the property intrusted to his care, he did 
not propose to leave anything undone that could be done, 



THE BURLINGTON STRIKE 413 

or that his competitors were doing, to save the owners from 
serious loss, that he intended to sail as close to the wind 
as the managers of other corporations similarly situated. 
Before General McNulta made this statement it had been 
announced in the press that the engineers on the Wabash 
would leave their positions if the Wabash receiver attempted 
to handle traffic coming to the Wabash from the Burlington. 

In this state of affairs, the Burlington Company on the 
afternoon of the 8th of March filed its petition in the Wa- 
bash receivership, in which an order was asked on General 
McNulta as receiver to interchange traffic with the Bur- 
lington, and for an order restraining the Brotherhood of 
Locomotive Engineers and P. M. Arthur, its chief executive 
officer, from in any way giving orders to the engineers in 
the employ of the receiver to refuse to haul loaded cars 
coming to or going from the railroad in charge of McNulta 
as receiver of the Wabash Railroad, in the usual course of 
business with the Burlington, and for a rule on Arthur to 
show cause why he should not be punished for contempt 
in interfering with the receiver in the operation of the 
Wabash Railroad. 

At the hearing on the 20th it developed that there had 
been no instructions by P. M. Arthur to any of the receiver's 
employees, and that on the 19th, Receiver McNulta, on his 
own volition, as he claimed, had resumed relations with the 
Burhngton. Alexander Sulhvan, Mr. Arthur's attorney, 
was then in the enjoyment of a large law practice and was 
the "uncrowned king" of the Irish organization known as 
the Clan-na-Gael. Wirt Dexter and Henry Crawford, coun- 
sel for the Burlington, pressed the contempt proceeding. 
Robert T. Lincoln, General George W. Smith, and William 
G. Beal, counsel for General McNulta, said, as the order of 
Receiver McNulta to his subordinates to refuse to inter- 
change traffic with the Burhngton had been rescinded and 
the receiver had no complaint to make against Arthur and 
Sargeant, the petition of the Burlington Company should be 



414 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

dismissed. But at the request of the Burhngton attorneys, 
Judge Gresham agreed to look into the papers, and the 
second day thereafter dehvered an opinion, in which he said : 

Although the property of the Wabash Coinpany is in the custody 
of the court, it is operated by the receiver as a common carrier. 
His rights and duties are those of a carrier. He is bound to afford 
all railroad companies whose lines connect with his, equal facili- 
ties for the exchange of traffic. It is his duty to receive from and 
deliver to other connecting roads both loaded and empty cars. 
He cannot discriminate against one road by maintaining a policy 
of non-intercourse with it. More need not be said on this ques- 
tion, as the receiver has wisely rescinded the instructions which 
discriminated against the petitioner, and declares he has no 
purpose or desire to deny to the petitioner any of its legal rights. 
Although the petition has accomplished its chief purpose in invok- 
ing the aid of the court, it is urged by its counsel that persons 
belonging to the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, and 
especially P. M. Arthur, who is the chief ofhcer of that organi- 
zation, have interfered with the receiver and his subordinates 
in the management of the Wabash property, and that they should 
be punished for their illegal and contumacious conduct. The 
receiver and his counsel make no such complaint. On the con- 
trary, the receiver declares there has been no such interference 
with him. While the affidavits submitted in support of the 
petition show that Mr. Arthur sent a telegraphic message to the 
engineers of the Union Pacific Railroad Company at Omaha, 
directing them to haul no cars of the petitioner, it does not fairly 
appear from the evidence that the engineers in the service of the 
receiver received such orders by telegraph or otherwise. For the 
present it is sufficient to say that the court will protect the prop- 
erty of the Wabash Coinpany in its custody. 

The employees of the receiver cannot be obliged to remain 
in his service against their will, but neither they nor others will 
be permitted to interfere with or disturb the receiver or his sub- 
ordinates in the possession and operation of the property in his 
custody. Lawless interferences with the receiver and his employ- 
ees in the discharge of their duty will not be tolerated. It is 
proper to state, however, in justice to the Wabash engineers, 



THE BURLINGTON STRIKE 415 

that they do not desire to maintain an attitude of defiance to the 
law, and that they are now wilhng to aid the receiver in the law- 
ful and successful administration of his trust. The receiver's 
answer renders it unnecessary for the court to do more than direct 
that the petition remain on file for future action should there be 
occasion for it. 

R. R. Cable, the president of the Rock Island Railroad 
Company, alone criticized the decision. In view of the 
ambiguity of the Interstate Commerce Act, Mr. Cable said 
the court was not justified in pronouncing a judgment that 
would involve other railroad corporations in the strike. 
But the decision was not based on the Interstate Com- 
merce Act, but on the general obligations of a common 
carrier to interchange traffic, and on the inherent powers 
of the court. The criticism was recognized by the bar and 
the lawmaking power as applying to the Interstate Act, and 
it was promptly amended so as to give the courts the power 
to do what Mr. Cable said Judge Gresham had assumed. 

With a statute behind him. Judge Taft took forty pages 
to reach a conclusion Judge Gresham arrived at in five. 
Under the Act as amended. Judge Taft in 1894 punished 
an engineer on the Pennsylvania Railroad for refusing to 
obey a mandatory injunction commanding the Pennsylvania 
Company and its employees to accept cars coming to the 
Pennsylvania Company at Toledo from the Toledo & Ann 
Arbor Road. Long opinions. Judge Gresham said, tend 
to create the impression in the popular mind that there is 
a doubt in the mind of the judge. There was acquiescence 
in the opinion in the "Q" case where there was dissent in 
the Ann Arbor. But this tribute I pay to Mr. Taft as judge 
and President: when it came to enforcing the law, he lived 
up to the best traditions of the Republic. 

After reading his opinion, Judge Gresham called Alex- 
ander Sullivan into chambers and told him there ought not 
to be a general strike, and urged him to give his clients good 
advice. According to some, a judge should not have done 



4i6 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

this. But the employees of the other hnes as well as the ' 
Wabash engineers, and Wirt Dexter, the counsel of the Bur- 
lington, accepted the decision as final. There was no gen- 
eral strike and Mr. Dexter declared himself satisfied. 

Afterwards, in a magazine article attacking courts in 
general, Eugene V. Debs, who was the secretary of the 
Brotherhood of Firemen at the time of the Burlington 
strike, stated that after the decision was announced, the 
firemen called on their counsel, Alexander Sullivan, for an 
opinion as to what Judge Gresham would do if in the face 
of the decision the heads of the Brotherhoods should order 
out the employees of the receiver of the Wabash. Sullivan 
said, "The judge will put you all in jail for contempt." 
Debs then stated, "We took no chances; we took Sullivan's 
advice, and paid him a big fee for his opinion." 

The practical results of the strike were a decision that 
common carriers were bound to interchange traffic although 
the employees of one were on a strike, the amendment of the 
Interstate Commerce Act to that effect, many men perma- 
nently out of their positions, and an entire change in the 
chief operating men on the Burlington system. 

During the Pullman strike, or "Debs's Rebellion," as 
the strike of 1894 was sometimes called, Walter Q. Gresham 
was Secretary of State in the cabinet of Grover Cleveland, 
A controversy arose in the shops of the Pullman Palace 
Car Company between it and its employees over wages. It 
was no concern of the American Railway Union, a new order 
that admitted to its membership all classes of railroad em- 
ployees. The controversy with the Pullman employees had 
not been carried on long until the annual convention of 
the American Railway Union met at Uhlrich Hall in Chi- 
cago. Over much opposition, Eugene V. Debs, the presi- 
dent, and George Howard, the vice-president of the order, 
carried through the convention a resolution to boycott 
Pullman cars and to declare a strike on all railroads that 
handled Pullman cars, unless the Pullman Company settled 



THE BURLINGTON STRIKE 417 

its controversy with its shop employees. It started with 
violence in Chicago, and spread all over the West and as 
far east as Pittsburgh before it stopped. 

Some of the railroad corporations contemplated filing a 
bill in the Federal courts to enjoin interference with their 
property, when Attorney-General Olney took the matter 
in hand and directed the filing of a Bill in Equity in the 
United States Circuit Court at Chicago in the name of the 
United States against Debs and his associates in the Amer- 
ican Railway Union, praying that they be enjoined from 
interfering with the property of all the railroads, specifically 
naming those entering at Chicago, and from interfering with 
free transportation of United States mails. In a measure 
the bill was drafted on the theory that the boycott was a 
conspiracy that fell within the ban of the Sherman Anti- 
trust Act of 1890. Judges Woods and Grosscup so inter- 
preted it, and issued an injunction which was served on 
some of the strikers by deputy United States marshals. 
Subsequently the Supreme Court held the injunction could 
not be maintained under the Sherman Act; Judge Woods 
is reported to have said, if not under the Sherman Act, not 
at all. The Supreme Court, resting its conclusion on its 
general equity powers and its duty to aid the executive in 
enforcing the commerce clause of the Constitution, upheld 
the injunction, and also the jail sentence of Debs and his 
associates imposed by Judge Woods for violating the in- 
junction. 

At this time Mayor Hopkins of Chicago, so it was said, 
was averse to furnishing adequate police protection, and 
Governor Altgeld was protesting against the President send- 
ing troops to Chicago except at his request. After the 
injunction was issued. Judge Woods said, "Now they have 
their injunction, let them enforce it." Judge Grosscup 
telegraphed the President for troops as soon as the injunc- 
tion was issued. Meantime the superintendent of the rail- 
way mail service at Chicago had notified the Postmaster- 



4i8 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

General that the movement of the mail trains at Chicago 
was prevented by force. There were troops in Chicago, 
more on their way, and General Nelson A. Miles's head- 
quarters were in Chicago. I had been in Chicago a short 
time before and had heard much of the unrest that was 
abroad, and of the disposition of some of the big business 
men to keep up the business depression. 

One day, after an early dinner, my husband and I took 
a drive to the Soldiers' Home. The evening papers had 
contained accounts of the way the strikers had been disre- 
garding the injunctions and destroying property and burn- 
ing cars. As we drove along I expressed my fears that the 
damage done would be large and that there might be a 
great loss of life, and as I had two grandchildren in Chicago, 
I was getting more apprehensive all the time. My hus- 
band said, "This is the most senseless strike ever inaugu- 
rated. Olney and Lamont have it in hand and it will soon 
be ended." 

To this I answered, "They never have had any experi- 
ence in such matters. Pullman is personally a very un- 
popular man. The feeling against him is not confined to 
the working classes. Rich men, but not so rich as he, share 
this feeling. Some of them will sell Pullman stock short 
and fan the flames. You remember how Charles T. Yerkes 
stirred up a strike on the West Division street car line 
when he wanted to buy J. Russell Jones's stock, and how 
old J. Russell sold. And don't you remember how General 
Miles came to our house and wanted you to put yourself 
at the head of the People's party movement? He even 
had prepared a proclamation he w^anted you to issue in 
which it was set forth that the Government had been per- 
verted from the purposes of the founders and was adminis- 
tered only in the interest of the few. In this document 
Miles denounced both Harrison and Cleveland. He said 
to you, if you would sign this, the masses who have made 
this country what it is would rally as a man to you. In 



THE BURLINGTON STRIKE 419 

his heart General Miles has a contempt for George M. 
Pullman, and his sympathies are with the masses. You 
had better do something." 

For a time there was silence. Then my husband said, 
"John, you had better drive home." At the Arlington 
Hotel he said, "I guess I will go to the White House." In 
two hours he returned and said, "You need worry no more 
about your grandchildren. We sent for Lament; General 
Miles has peremptory orders to command the situation, 
and he has all the troops he needs for that purpose. 
Lamont talked to him over the telephone." The next day 
President Cleveland issued his proclamation calling on all 
good citizens to abstain from force and violence and not to 
interfere further with the movement of mail trains and in- 
ter-state commerce. It was this proclamation and General 
Miles's prompt action that suppressed the disorder in Chi- 
cago. Lawyers and judges meet at Bar Associations and 
write and talk about how the injunction of Judges Woods 
and Grosscup suppressed the Debs strike. Instead of abat- 
ing the "nuisance," the issuance of the injunction only 
infuriated the mob. Its only practical effect, including 
Debs's imprisonment for contempt without a jury trial, 
was to make him a martyr and perennial candidate for 
President on the Socialist ticket. But for this, distrusted 
by the men he had misled, he might soon have disap- 
peared. The disorder suppressed, if the criminal code 
was so crude that Debs and his confederates could not be 
successfully prosecuted before a jury, and in this my hus- 
band did not concur, it was the duty of Congress to amend 
the law by defining what acts of interfering with a mail 
train or any part of an interstate railroad, constituted a 
crime. But the failure of Congress to provide a specific 
criminal code did not give the equity court jurisdiction 
in criminal cases. 



CHAPTER XXVI 

THE GREENBACK CONTENTION IN INDIANA 

POLITICS 



THE MONEY QUESTION — LEGAL TENDER DECISIONS — 
CONSTITUTIONALITY OF GREENBACKS — WHAT IS MONEY? — 
PASSAGE OF THE " PUBLIC DEBT ACT" — DEMOCRATIC VIC- 
TORY OF 1874 — HENRY WATTERSON, THOMAS A. HENDRICKS, 
AND DANIEL W. VOORHEES — RESUMPTION OF SPECIE PAY- 
MENTS — REISSUE OF PAPER — DISCUSSION OF THE LAST 
LEGAL TENDER DECISION. THAT OF 1884 — A CABINET DINNER 
PARTY IN WASHINGTON. 

TN 1874 Judge Gresham supported Michael C. Kerr as a 
-■■ Democrat for Congress on a hard money platform. 
In those days the distinction was "hard" or "sound money" 
men, and "soft" or "paper money" men — men who be- 
lieved in coin, the gold and silver of the constitution, or 
men who believed in a paper currency behind which stood 
the pledge of the nation. My husband belonged to the 
former class. 

Political in form, the question in its essence was, and 
is, economic and judicial. What was, or is, money? After- 
wards, in the '90's, a great question arose as to which, gold 
or silver, was money. Economic conditions had changed 
the value of silver. Mr. Bryan said the word "coin" 
meant silver; Mr. Cleveland said it meant gold. The over- 
production of silver debased it as money. The increased 
production of gold answered the objection that the demon- 
etization of silver contracted the volume of money or the 
medium of exchange. 

In 1874 the simple question was. Did the word "coin" 
mean unlimited issues of paper money? Certainly not. 

420 



GREENBACK CONTENTION IN INDIANA 42: 

And before the nations have recovered from the effects of 
the present European war, the kings, the bankers, and the 
people of Europe will realize that unlimited issues of prom- 
ises, on paper, to pay, even if it be in the form of bonds, is 
not money. Silver will be better than that. Should the 
alchemist succeed in making gold as common as pig iron, 
it would no longer be money, the medium of exchange 
or the yardstick. But so long as it continues at its present 
volume, it will be the medium in which the final settlement 
must be made. 

The Union soldier was paid in "greenbacks," which were 
at a discount at the start and decreased in value as they 
increased in volume; that is, gold commanded a higher 
premium every day, especially after a Union defeat, just 
as the Confederate soldiers' money went to zero with the 
collapse of the Confederacy. So unhmited were the issues 
of the paper money of the Continental Congress, and so 
worthless did that money become, that we still have the 
expression, "Not worth a Continental." It takes some- 
thing more than a printing press and unlimited supplies of 
ink and white paper to make money. But the greenback, 
dollar for dollar, bought government bonds, while the bonds 
would not, at their face, buy gold for the government. Not 
many of the soldiers, however, whose sacrifices were to 
make the bonds as good as gold, had any greenbacks to 
spare to buy bonds, and therein was the basis for the argu- 
ment that was afterwards made against paying the bonds 
in gold. 

My observation of the prowess of the Federal soldiers 
in the field, and the abihty of many of their leaders whom I 
met, led me to invest in government bonds the money my 
husband sent me "for a rainy day." At this time I was 
saving to the last degree. I bought some "seven-thirties," 
that is, bonds drawing seven per cent and payable in thirty 
years. When gold went to 260 and my husband thought 
it would go higher, he advised shifting the savings from 
27 



422 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

bonds to gold, but told me to consult Mr. Slaughter. Mr. 
wSlaughter said gold was too high. He was a very clear- 
headed man with unbounded faith in the securities of our 
government, even more than my husband, so I continued 
to hold on to my few bonds. 

Walter O. Gresham accepted the "greenback" as a dis- 
tinct war measure, assuming they were to be retired at the 
end of hostilities. During 1862-3, the government issued 
in all $450,000,000. They took their name from the color 
of the paper on which they were printed. They were 
really a loan, and in order to make them circulate, to get 
the credit desired, the government made them legal tender 
for all debts. Before the first greenback or legal tender 
act was passed, it was objected that they would not be 
constitutional, that only gold and silver could be made a 
legal tender in the payment of debts. This was Judge 
Gresham's view. Secretary Chase doubted whether they 
would be constitutional, but finally, as a war measure, 
recommended their adoption. 

Hugh McCulloch succeeded WilHam Pitt Fessenden, who 
had followed Salmon P. Chase, as Secretary of the Treasury. 
And the country never had an abler or more experienced 
financier in charge of the Treasury Department than Hugh 
McCulloch. He was the Comptroller of the Currency and 
had been such since the creation of that office as part of the 
national banking system up to the time he was made Secre- 
tary of the Treasury. Before the war, Mr. McCulloch had 
been president of the Indiana State Banking System, which 
rode the panic of 1859 with ease, paying gold on demand 
when most of the banks of the country suspended. As a 
young lawyer, Walter Q. Gresham early became intimate 
with Hugh McCulloch. We were neighbors of Mr. and Mrs. 
McCulloch when my husband was in Mr. Arthur's cabinet. 

As soon as the army was disbanded. Secretary McCul- 
loch, with a view to returning to a specie basis, began con- 
verting the greenbacks into government bonds; that is, 



GREENBACK CONTENTION IN INDIANA 423 

retiring them as was contemplated should be done when 
they were issued. In this, he had my husband's most 
cordial approval. But to this policy there at once aro.se 
violent opposition in Congress, led by Thaddeus Stevens, 
until finally Congress put a stop to it by the Act of Febru- 
ary 4, 1868, which provided that the amount of greenbacks 
then outstanding, $356,000,000, should be left in circulation. 
Mr. Stevens said that under the funding acts, the Secretary 
of the Treasury had more power than a czar, and the only 
czar Thaddeus Stevens was ever in favor of was himself. 
To allay the uncertainty that followed the promulgation of 
Mr. Stevens's views and the act of February 4, 1868, Con- 
gress w^as forced to pass "The Public Credit Act," that of 
March 18, 1869, which declared that United States notes 
and all other obhgations of the government, except those 
expressly payable in paper money, should be paid in coin. 

The State courts, to escape the charge of disloyalty, 
had uniformly during the war upheld the constitutionality 
of the greenback legislation. Finally a case presenting the 
question reached the Supreme Court of the United States. 
It involved a contract made before the war, for the pay- 
ment of money, at a time when it was admitted that nothing 
but gold and silver coin was legal tender. The day of pay- 
ment as specified in the contract, February 20, 1862, was 
before the first legal tender act went into effect. The judg- 
ment of the Court was adverse to the constitutionality of 
the act. The opinion, which was delivered by Chief Justice 
Chase, January 29, 1870, was concurred in by Justices 
Nelson, Clifford, Field, and Greer; Justices Miller, Swain, 
and Davis dissented. 

Then in a few days, under an Act of Congress which had 
taken effect the first Monday in December, 1869, increasing 
the membership of the court to nine, Justice Greer retired, 
and two new members were appointed, Justices Bradley 
and Strong. 

Justice Strong was taken from the Supreme Court of 



424 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

Pennsylvania, where, over a strong dissent, he had written 
an opinion upholding the constitutionality of the legal ten- 
der acts. Justice Bradley had the indorsement of Thaddeus 
Stevens, and was close, it was said, to the Pennsylvania 
Railroad Company, which just then did not want to pay 
gold and silver to its employees and bondholders. 

Before the change in the personnel of the court, the 
Attorney-General filed a petition for a rehearing and 
made an application for a re-argument. The question. 
What would be the effect of a contract for the payment of 
money after the Act went into effect? was not the question 
before the court in the case decided by the Chief Justice. 
After the re-argument, the court as enlarged, by a vote of 
five to four, overruled the decision of Chief Justice Chase. 
Justices Nelson, Clifford, and Field stayed with the Chief 
Justice. Justices Bradley and Strong, the two new mem- 
bers, with Miller, Swain, and Davis, who had dissented 
from the former judgment of the court, constituted the five. 
They decided that the legal tender feature of the greenbacks 
was constitutional and applied to all contracts, whether 
made before or after the passage of the acts for the payment 
of la^^^ul money, except those expressly payable in coin. 
The opinion of the court, however, as written by Justice 
vStrong, was put on the distinct ground that the act was 
constitutional because it was a war measure. Walter Q. 
Gresham, as a judge, agreed with Chief Justice Chase, 
who adhered to his views in a dissenting opinion. I often 
heard him discussing the decision of these cases with Judge 
David Davis and also Judge Drummond. It was said in 
the public prints of that day that the membership of the 
court had been changed for the express purpose of bringing 
about the change in decision. However this may be, it is 
clear that judicial questions in their essence are in a large 
degree social, economic, and political. 

The legal tender decisions entered into Michael C. 
Kerr's campaign for Congress in 1874. The panic of 1873 



GREENBACK CONTENTION IN INDIANA 425 

had brought forward the inflationists of both parties. 
They claimed the sanction of the Supreme Court. The 
Congress that met in December, 1873. was Repubhcan by 
a good majority but not by two-thirds. Under the leader- 
ship of Senator Oliver P. Morton, the Inflation Bill, as it 
was called, was passed. It increased the volume of green- 
backs from $356,000,000 to $400,000,000, but on April 22, 
1874, it met with a veto at the hands of President Grant. 
Senator Morton always claimed, as he understood General 
Grant's position at the beginning of the session, that the 
Inflation Bill would meet with presidential approval. In 
helping revolutionize the Supreme Court, General Grant 
did not indicate hostility to the greenbacks, but in his veto 
message, he took the ground that he w^as keeping his own 
and his party's faith. Some credited the veto to Roscoe 
Conkling, who had voted against the bill and had opposed 
the original issue of greenbacks. 

Mr. Kerr, as a candidate for Congress in the State at 
large in 1872, had been defeated with his party. In his 
stead in our district our old friend Simeon K. Wolf, had 
been elected. Mr. Wolf was an inflationist and a green- 
backer and wrote letters from Washington to our home 
papers. He declared that General Grant was all right on 
the money question until the representatives of Wall Street 
and the bondholders arrived and induced him to send in 
the veto. He predicted that when the people were heard 
from, there would be different laws from those we then had 
on the currency question. 

Meantime Mr. Kerr had been practising law in New 
Albany and reconstructing his political fences through our 
congressional district. My husband saw much of his old 
opponent for Congress. During this period Judge David 
Davis came to New Albany and held court. While our 
guest it happened General Bristow^ came to see him, and 
the same afternoon and at the same time Mr. Kerr called. 
The only public question they discussed was the money 

1 Secretary of the Treasury. 



426 LIFE OF WALTER QLUNTIN (i RE SHAM 

question. On it, I remember, Bristow said Morton had 
ruined the chances of the Repubhcans in Indiana. I heard 
the financial question much discussed while I was at Indi- 
anapolis on many visits during the winter of 1873-4, where 
I saw a good deal of Joseph E. MacDonald, who was a sound 
money man. One cold morning that winter Mr. MacDonald 
came to our house in New Albany for breakfast. He was 
then helping Mr. Kerr organize his district. My husband 
asked him whether he or Governor Hendricks would lead 
the Indiana Democracy' on the money question. Mr. 
MacDonald said he would. My husband said he doubted 
it, and to help out he made a trip to Harrison County 
and to other points to see some of his former Democratic 
clients in Mr. Kerr's interest. Some of these former clients 
had voted for him as against Mr. Kerr. Others who de- 
clared they would do anything for my husband but vote 
for him on the radical ticket, said: "Judge, we will give 
you your choice between Democrats." One big, strapping 
Democrat, who controlled a large number of votes, came 
to our house and waited several hours, as my husband was 
returning from Indiana])olis, only to say to him: "Judge, 
if you think Mike Kerr is a better man than wSim Wolf, we 
will go for Mike." One man who had induced his father, 
his sons, and a numljer of his neighbors to vote for my 
husband, but who would not vote that way himself, declar- 
ing he never had and never would scratch a Democratic 
ticket, was, with all his following, easily turned to Mr. 
Kerr's support. Both before the convention and at the 
polls Walter Q. Gresham helped Mr. Kerr that year. Mr. 
Kerr himself said he was most of all aided by Mr. Gresham's 
moral support, counsel, and advice. 

The plan of Mr. Kerr and Mr. MacDonald was to lead 
the Democratic State Convention to adopt a sound money 
platform by anticipating its meeting with their conven- 
tion July I. Accordingly, on that day the Democrats of 
the Third Congressional District met at Seymour and 



GREENBACK CONTENTION IN INDIANA 427 

iinanimously nominated Mr. Kerr on a short, simple plat- 
form, declaring for sound money and a tariff for revenue 
onlv, after accepting the war amendents to the constitution 
of the United States. 

In his speech accepting the nomination on his own plat- 
form, Mr. Kerr began by saying: 

On the great subjects of currency and taxation there are 
to-day in our country and in the ranks of all political parties, in 
the minds of the people and in the press, the most remarkable 
absence of unity and harmony of opinion and the most embarrass- 
ing diversity of plans, policies, sentiments, and fancies. 

Then after dismissing all partisan questions and accept- 
ing the amendments to the Constitution, he said: 

There never was and never can be a good national currency 
that does not rest upon the true foundation of intrinsic value of 
mone\' whose value is fixed by the labor it costs to produce it; 
of money created under the injunction "that in the sweat of thy 
face shalt thou eat bread." Full of these convictions, wise in the 
then past experiences of the world, and faithful to duty, our 
forefathers imbedded these principles in our Constitution and 
cherished the fond hope that they had hereby forever secured 
their posterity against the evils of irredeemable paper ciuTency. 
They declared in the Constitution that "no State shall make 
anything but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts." 
That is our constitutional basis, and it precisely coincides with 
the conclusions of universal experience and of science, of sound 
morality and national law. It is the fixed and irreversible judg- 
ment of mankind that the currency of commerce shall be gold 
and silver. 

But these sound sentiments were without effect on the 
dehberations of the Democratic State Convention which 
met at Indianapolis July 14. It was tinder the control of 
Thomas A. Hendricks, then Governor of Indiana, and Dan- 
iel W. Voorhees. They adopted a noncommittal platform 
on the tariff, but on the inflation question they out-inflated 
the inflationists; they even demanded the repeal of the 



428 LIFE OF WALTER QUINT IN GRESHAM 

"Public Credit Act" of 1869. which provided that the 
government bonds should be paid in coin. 

Following the lead of their State platform, a portion of 
the Democrats put up old General John T. Cravens as a 
candidate against Mr. Kerr on an inflation platform. The 
Repubhcans, as an organization, and all the postmasters 
in the district endorsed him, and then he was called an 
"Independent." 

The Honorable Simeon K. Wolf came home and took the 
stump for General Cravens. Some of the things Mr. Wolf 
said may not be without interest now. He complained 
that while he was at Washington working against the con- 
traction of the currency — voting for more money — a snap 
convention was held behind his back at Seymour. "It 
was understood at Washington that General Grant would 
sign the bill which passed Congress on the currency ques- 
tion^ until the W^all Street delegation reached there. If 
there is such a sap-head in Washington County as believes 
the W^all Street men are not working for themselves and 
against the people, then he should vote for the Seymour 
candidate. The Democratic, Republican, and Farmers' 
State Conventions are all in favor of more money. Also 
all others, except one in Illinois and one in Seymour. I will 
do almost anything for harmony, but I must preserve my 
principles before that. The Indianapolis and Seymour 
platforms conflict. Read me out of the party if I don't 
go Seymour, and I'll read you out if you don't go Indian- 
apolis." 

Both Governor Hendricks and Daniel W. \'oorhees were 
sticking to the IndianapoHs platform, and the embarrass- 
ment of Mr. Kerr was great when Henry Watterson, in an 
editorial in the Louisville Courier-] oitrual, "dropped a 
brick" on the Governor's head: 

Take Indiana, for example. The last Democratic State Con- 
vention was an offense to decency and intelligence. The only 
brave and jmre man of influence in it was Mr. Ken% and he was not 



GREENBACK CONTENTION IN INDIANA 429; 

able to rally enough men like himself to do any good. Nothing 
could more conclusively show what a farce it is to talk of Hendricks 
for the White House. It was Dan Voorhees' work certainly; for 
he wants to be the only Daniel in the lion's den, and is always 
able to raise the devil among the sheep and the doves represented 
and led by the sweet-faced kid in the executive mansion at Indi- 
anapolis. 

This made a great scurrying among the Democrats on 
our side of the river. Governor Hendricks was a Presi- 
dential candidate. L. G. Mathews, one of the New Albany 
neighbors and a friend of Mr. Kerr, was then temporarily 
in charge of the Indianapolis Sentinel. He mildly depre- 
cated the attacks on the Indiana executive, just enough to 
bring to Mr. Hendricks' attention and the attention of 
the people what Watterson had said. Later on Governor 
Hendricks repudiated the inflation plank of his platform 
and acquiesced in responsibility for its being put on Voor- 
hees. Not only that, but Governor Hendricks went into 
the third district and supported Mr. Kerr, and even entered 
into a joint discussion with General Cravens. 

But not so with Daniel W. Voorhees, who scented the 
deal which was revealed as soon as the polls closed. He 
struck immediately at Messrs. Watterson and Hendricks 
by saying that he was tempted by no "glittering purse in 
the shape of an office," and had nothing to fear or expect 
from the favor or enmity of the press, east or west, north 
or south. 

Until Governor Hendricks switched, Daniel Webster 
Voorhees was slated for United vStates Senator. Mr. Voor- 
hees' speeches were printed in the Cincinnati Enquirer 
and sent broadcast throughout the district as a campaign 
document against Mr. Kerr; and they almost defeated him, 
as well as greatly embarrassing Governor Hendricks. But 
most important of all, the following extracts from these 
speeches indicate the difficulty there was in resuming 
"specie payments." 



430 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

It is difficult to consider with i)atience much of the senseless 
clamour we now hear on the subject of s]3ecie payments. Its 
ad\'ocates scarcely condescend to point out any method by which 
it is to be done. They are not so much to be blamed for this, 
however, if a few facts are taken into consideration. This govern- 
ment is possessed of not more than $150,000,000 of gold, with 
no prospect of greatly increasing that amount at an early day. 
Our paper circulation of greenbacks and bank notes amounts to 
about $1,173,000,000. 

After showing that this would enable the government to 
pay only two cents on the dollar, he called attention to what 
he said was the only plan that met the issue, that of the 
Chicago Times. "Destroy and burn the money now in 
circulation in the hands of the people until there is no more 
of it than there is gold to redeem it. But this would be 
atrocious. The fact is," he concluded, "specie payments 
are impossible." 

About "The Public Credit Act" Mr. Voorhees said: 

When beaten, however, on cx^ery proposition of law and on 
every point of history relating to the law on which the 5-20 
bonds were issued and sold, the advocates of the money power, 
the a])ologists for plunder, always fall l^ack on that gigantic 
fraud known as the Act of March 18, iS6(). Fourteen days after 
the inauguration of General Grant, a well-defined, plainly writ- 
ten, carefully constructed, and unixersally admitted law of the 
contract between the peojjlc of tlie United States on the one 
hand and the bondholding ])ublic creditors on the other, "was 
sought to be set aside and another contract enacted in its place 
whereby the unlawful gain of the bondholders and the conse- 
quent plunder of the taxpayers would amount to at least $500,- 
000,000. Such a piece of legislative ^•i^lainy as this has no equal 
in liistor\-. 

Mr. Voorhees then quoted Senator Morton's reason for 
voting against the Act of March 18, 1869, namely: 

That it would be foul injustice to the government and people 
of the United States, after we sold these bonds on an average of 



f ; R P: E N B A C K CONTENTION IN INDIANA 43 1 

not more than 60 cents on the dollar, now to propose to make a 
new contract for the benefit of the bondholders. 

As to the greenbacks, Mr. \"oorhees said: 

Our circulating coin has disappeared, paper money has taken 
its place, sustained as a valuable medium of commerce and trade 
not on a specie basis at all, but by a confidence in the real and 
constantly increasing wealth of the countr\-, the exchangeable 
value of the annual produce of its lands and labor. And now 
let us see what this currency, resting on such a basis, has done 
for the American people in the past. With legal tender notes, 
the debt of the State of Indiana, amounting to ujjwards of 
$10,000,000, was paid. Much of this debt, too, was contracted 
before the war, on a gold basis. The debts of nearly all the 
States were paid in the same wa_\-. Greenbacks heretofore were 
good enough for State creditors. Are they not good enough 
for national creditors' It was not repudiation then. Why 
shcnild it l:)e called repudiation now!" All private debts have 
been paid in this currency for more than twelve years past, 
whether such debts were contracted when gold and silver were 
only legal tender, or afterwards. In this way, j^ayments have 
been made amounting to more than five times our national debt. 
It seems the people are not yet aware that this currency was 
mere "shinplaster scrip," such as is issued by a wildcat bank 
in the back woods. Do they think so now? Greenbacks were 
good enough to pay the soldier for his blood and his life during 
the war, and that too when they were not worth more than half 
as m.uch as they are now. 

There was a time, however, strange as it may now seem, when 
greenbacks were esteemed good enough for the bondholders. 
But it was when he paid them out in the purchase of bonds for 
which he now demands gold. They paid for every 5-20 bond 
that was ever in existence. When they were only worth 50 cents 
on the dollar they paid for these bonds, dollar for dollar. One 
thousand dollars in greenbacks, worth $500 in gold, bought a 
thousand dollar bond which is now claimed shall be paid in gold 
at its face. When legal tender notes were rendering their welcome 
service to the capitalist they were not " shinplasters " ; now they 
are "unredeemable rag currency." They were then recognized 



432 Llf^E OF WALTER QUINTIN ORE SHAM 

as the money b\- which the Union was preser\'ed, Idv which our 
credit was upheld at home and abroad, by which our country 
grew and developed its resources even amidst a tremendous war, 
by which the Pacific railroads were built during the period of 
civic strife, and by which a commercial prosperity prevailed 
which we have never had since. Tlien it was held to be disloyal 
to oppose them as legal tenders. 

Contemporaneously with the circulation of the Voorhees 
speeches, the charge was made that Mr. Kerr was a govern- 
ment bondholder — that he even held some of the 5-20's 
that Mr. Voorhees was so loudly declaiming against. While 
this was not true and was finally denied, it did not injure 
Mr. Kerr with the holders of government bonds, and there 
were quite a number of them throughout the district, but 
it did make many of the soldier element vote for General 
Cravens. 

Mr. Kerr's was an educational campaign. The labor he 
went through, speaking twice daily, travehng continuously, 
undermined his health and ultimately led to his death. 
Although there was but httle allusion to the tariff in the 
campaign speeches, infant industries, plate glass and rolling 
mill interests of the district supported General Cravens. 
Democratic defection from Mr. Kerr was large, and so was 
the defection of the Republicans from General Cravens. 
But for Republican votes Mr. Kerr would have been hope- 
lessly defeated. The Democratic State ticket had a major- 
ity of 4,800 in' the district, while Mr. Kerr's was but 1,000. 
In the State the Democrats were in the majority by 10,000, 
and also in the legislature. In the nation at large, the 
Democrats elected for the first time since 1858 a majority 
of the members of the Lower House of Congress. The 
announcement came immediately after the election that 
when the legislature met it would elect, as it did, Jos- 
eph E. MacDonald as United States senator instead of 
Mr. X^oorhees. 

At a meeting held at Nashville in the last days of 



GREENBACK CONTENTION IN INDIANA 433 

November, 1874, to celebrate the Democratic victory of 
that year, Mr. Kerr was the principal speaker. "Marse 
Henry" got up the meeting and there revealed Mr. Kerr 
as his candidate for speaker of the House of Representa- 
tives. At the assembling of Congress in December, 1875, 
Mr. Kerr was elected speaker only to survive until July 16, 
1876. In acknowledging at the Nashville meeting the aid 
he had received from Republican sources, Mr. Kerr said : 

But it is not in Massachusetts alone that we have had the 
aid of Liberal and Republican votes to achieve recent triumi)hs 
over wrong, radicalism, and corruption. To a greater or less 
extent we have had the like aid in all parts of the coinitr}'. It 
is fit and just that we should recognize this fact, and so use the 
power conferred on us by these victories as to deserve again the 
confidence and cooperation of such good and worthy citizens. 

Among the uninvited speakers at this Nashville meeting 
were Thomas A. Hendricks and Daniel W. Voorhees. It 
was made plain by this meeting that the real leaders of the 
Democracy were getting away from the Bourbonism that 
led to the war, and as a means to that end were declaring 
for the resumption of specie payments and the payment of 
all the obligations of the government in coin. The Demo- 
cratic party before the War of the Rebellion w^as a sound 
money party. Vagaries may prevail for a time, but on the 
question of economics and finances the people are sound 
and cannot long be misled. 

The wisdom and force of the new order of the Democracy 
were very soon manifest. The Republican organization had 
to quit dallying with the money question. 

January 14, 1875, Congress, which was still Repubhcan, 
passed the Act for the Resumption of Specie Payments ; that 
is, that on and after January i, 1879, the Secretary of the 
Treasury should redeem the notes of the United States in 
coin, and that in the meantime, to get the coin with which 
to do so, the Secretary of the Treasur}^ was authorized to 
sell bonds. 



434 LIFE OF WALTER Q I I N T I N GRESHAM 

Could the Northern Democrats and the Southern leaders 
in 1866 and 1868 have taken the position they did in 1874, 
we would have escaped many of the blights of Reconstruc- 
tion. The entire fault must not rest on Thaddeus Stevens 
and Charles Sumner. When the final balance is struck, 
the chief blame will rest on the Hendrickses, the Pendletons. 
and the Seymours. The refusal on their part in the first 
instance to accord, if not demand, that protection in the 
law to the former slave that natural justice dictated, was 
utterly inexcusable. Resistance to the adoption of the 
13th and 14th Amendments is what clothed Stevens and 
Sumner for a time with almost. unlimited power to pass the 
15th or Suffrage Amendment. All the more credit then is 
due to the Southern men; they were the first to see the 
mistake and come forward to correct it. The leaders in 
this line were Henry Watterson of Kentucky and John M. 
Allen of Tupelo, Mississippi. In his teens when the Con- 
federate line broke at Nashville that cold December morning 
in 1864, "Private John" was still a young man when, as 
one of the delegates to the Democratic Convention of 1872, 
he insisted on nominating Horace Greejey over men like 
Thomas A. Hendricks. 

The relations of Watterson, Hendricks, and Voorhees 
never became cordial. At that time I did not know Mr. 
Watterson personally, but later on it was my good fortune 
to know him well. It was subsequent to this that I learned 
also to know Mr. \'oorhees. He honestly believed in the 
biblical saying that it was "easier for a camel to go through 
the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the 
Kingdom of Heaven." My husband and Mr. Voorhees 
were friends then, and afterwards became very intimate 
personally and politically. During the Cleveland admin- 
istration I came to know Mr. Voorhees well. At that time 
he told me that Governor Hendricks had abandoned his 
principles in 1874 and yet failed to gain the favor of the 
East and of the strong men of the South like Henry 



GREENBACK CONTENTION IN INDIANA 435 

Watterson. In 1876 "Marse Henr>' and his gang" were for 
Samuel J. Tilden's nomination, and Daniel W. Voorhees 
was easily reconciled to Governor Hendricks being assigned 
to second place. 

The Resumption Act of 1875, the Sherman Act of 18 go. 
and Daniel W. Voorhees as chairman of the Finance Com- 
mittee of the United States Senate, were the great factors 
of the panic of 1893. 

I can not leave the greenbacks without telling about the 
discussion which occurred at a Cabinet dinner in March, 
1884, while my husband was Postmaster-General. The 
anomaly in our monetary system was the Legal Tender Act 
of 1878, which provided that after greenbacks, with their 
legal tender feature, had been reduced under the act for the 
resumption of specie payments, they should be reissued im- 
mediately. In other words, the government was required 
to keep up the endless chain of taking up in coin and then 
immediately reissuing its paper obligations. A New York 
broker challenged the constitutionality of this act when a 
citizen of Pennsylvania offered to pay with greenbacks 
bonds bought for his account. The broker said he must 
have gold. The case went to the Supreme Court of the 
United States where its constitutionality was upheld. The 
Wednesday following the announcement of the decision we 
had our dinner party for the President. 

There were present President Arthur, Justice Gray, who 
had delivered the opinion of the court ; Justice Blatchford ; 
Attorney-General Brewster; Robert R. Hitt, then a mem- 
ber of Congress from Illinois; William E. Chandler, Secre- 
tary of the Navy^; George Bancroft, the historian; Belden 
Noble, and several others. I was the only woman present, 
and I had made special effort to have a good dinner. I 
had excellent terrapin, good wine, and old Virginia ham, of 
which Mr. Arthur was especially fond. They all seemed, 
as the Attorney-General said he was, hungry and thirsty. 
As they forgot their hunger and fatigue, the discussion 



436 LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM 

turned to Justice Gray's legal tender decision. The gov- 
ernment was not a party to the litigation, as it had been 
in the former legal tender cases. I remember especially 
that Mr. Arthur, who had appointed both Justice Gray and 
Justice Blatchford, was pointed in his criticism of the valid- 
ity of the decision. There was much raillery, which the 
Justice received good-humoredly but with manifest embar- 
rassment and surprise. One thing that impressed me was 
that Justice Gray did not maintain his position as readily 
as- I supposed a man of his attainments and experience 
would do in a discussion of that kind. I remember he said 
that Chief Justice Chase took a different view of the ques- 
tion when he was Secretary of the Treasur}^; that the pro- 
hibition against the States making anything but gold and 
silver legal tender did not apply to the Congress of the 
United States. But this did not meet with the objection 
of Mr. Chandler that the notes ^yere to be re-issued after 
being retired in time of peace when they were issued con- 
fessedly and only as a war measure. "The monarchs of 
Europe had possessed from time immemorial the right to 
make paper money a legal tender," said the justice, "to 
debase the coin of the realm." The answer was that the 
kings of Europe had done many things that were not right, 
one of which the framers of the Constitution thought they 
had effectually guarded against — the debasing of the cir- 
culating medium. More powerful than the government 
that emanated from a single man or king, the government 
of the people could exercise only rightful and legitimate 
powers. My husband, who was the host, could not be as 
free as his guests in criticizing the Justice, but he mentioned 
the fact that Senator Jones had stated in the argument on 
the Inflation Bill, that if no greenbacks had been issued the 
war would have cost a billion and a half less money than 
it did. 



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